cli

flood CLI

The Flood IO Command Line Interface

Installation

On macOS, install using homebrew:

brew install flood-io/taps/flood

On linux, download the latest release for your platform, then extract and install it:

# assuming you're installing version 1.0.0 on linux
cd ~/Downloads
mkdir flood
tar zxvf flood-1.0.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz -C flood

# move the file to somewhere on your $PATH:
mv flood/flood /usr/local/bin/flood

# optionally, tidy up:
rm -rf flood

Writing Flood Chrome scripts

Flood IO now allows you to generate load from Flood Chrome using load scripts written in TypeScript or type-checked Javascript.

The process for running a load test using Flood Chrome is the same as for other generators (such as JMeter and Gatling): you develop and debug a script locally before creating and running a Flood at scale via the Flood IO web interface.

The flood verify command helps to streamline the development and debugging phase by running your script against a real-but-unscaled instance of Flood Chrome.

1. Create your script

Scripts are written in TypeScript (or Javascript, but we strongly recommend TypeScript to help write your scripts more quickly and robustly). Full Flood Chrome script documentation is available here TBA.

cd ~/dev
flood init cart-test

# flood init creates some files for you to get started

cd cart-test

Now edit test.ts to implement your test (Hint: if you don't already have a go-to code editor, we recommend Microsoft Visual Studio Code as it works particularly well with TypeScript as used by Flood Chrome.)

2. Run the script

flood verify test.ts

Note that you must first log in using flood login and your Flood IO credentials (see below)

3. Iterate - develop and debug your script

Verify that your script is compiling and running correctly, and is testing the correct things:

• Observe errors in the flood verify output.
• Use console.log and assert to ensure your test is working correctly.
• Set a unique value for settings.userAgent and search for it in your logs.

Each time you fix or tweak your script, return to step 2 and re-run it.

4. Launch a scaled up Flood at Flood IO

Once you're happy with the operation of your test script, visit https://flood.io to create a Flood. Here you can run your script on up to 50 Flood Chrome instances per Flood node for simulating thousands of browser users.

(Note we plan to expand this CLI to allow running fully scaled Floods directly from the command line)

Usage

flood help

Authenticating

Before you can do anything, we need to authenticate your local machine with your Flood account:

$ flood login

What's your username:
Enter a value: [email protected]

What's your password (masked):
Enter a value: **************************************************

Welcome back Ivan Vanderbyl!

This will store a temporary authentication token on your machine.

You can deregister this machine by running flood logout at any time.

Development

See Development