Announcing Hurl 6.0.0

Hi, I'm super happy to announce the release of Hurl 6.0.0

Hurl is an Open Source command line tool that allow you to run and test HTTP requests with plain text. You can use it to get datas or to test HTTP APIs (JSON / GraphQL / SOAP) in a CI/CD pipeline.

A basic sample:

GET https://example.org/api/tests/4567
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
header "x-foo" contains "bar"
certificate "Expire-Date" daysAfterNow > 15
jsonpath "$.status" == "RUNNING"    # Check the status code
jsonpath "$.tests" count == 25      # Check the number of items
jsonpath "$.id" matches /\\d{4}/     # Check the format of the id

Under the hood, Hurl uses curl with Rust bindings (thanks to the awesome curl-rust crate). With curl as HTTP engine, Hurl is fast, reliable and HTTP/3 ready!

Documentation: https://hurl.dev

GitHub: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

In this new release, we have added:

• generating dynamic values with functions
• curl run export
• shorter syntax for sections

Generating Dynamic Values with Functions

Before 6.0.0, Hurl files could be only templatized with variables. Variables are either injected in the command line,
in [Options] section or through captures.

For instance, let's take this Hurl file:

PUT https://example.org/api/hits
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "key0": "{{a_string}}",
    "key1": {{a_bool}},
    "key2": {{a_null}},
    "key3": {{a_number}}
}

When called with these options:

$ hurl --variable a_string=apple \\
       --variable a_bool=true \\
       --variable a_null=null \\
       --variable a_number=42 \\
       test.hurl

it runs a PUT request with the following JSON body:

{
    "key0": "apple",
    "key1": true,
    "key2": null,
    "key3": 42
}

With Hurl 6.0.0, we're introducing functions to generate dynamic values. Current functions are:

• newUuid to generate an UUID v4 random string,
• newDate to generate an RFC 3339 UTC date string, at the current time.

In the following example, we use the newDate function to generate a dynamic query parameter:

GET https://example.org/api/foo
[QueryStringParams]
date: {{newDate}}
HTTP 200

We run a GET request to https://example.org/api/foo?date=2024%2D12%2D02T10%3A35%3A44%2E461731Z where the date
query parameter value is 2024-12-02T10:35:44.461731Z URL encoded.

In this second example, we use the newUuid function to generate an email dynamically:

POST https://example.org/api/foo
{
  "name": "foo",
  "email": "{{newUuid}}@test.com"
}

When run, the request body will be:

{
  "name": "foo",
  "email": "0531f78f-7f87-44be-a7f2-969a1c4e6d97@test.com"
}

Functions are a really nice addition to the Hurl file format, we've started small with these two functions, but we plan to add many more; don't hesitate to open a discussion for your use case!

curl Run Export

In 6.0.0, we have added a new option to help debug and export your Hurl files: with the new --curl option, we can exportrun files to a list of curl commands. It's really convenient:

$ hurl --curl commands.txt *.hurl
$ cat commands.txt
curl 'https://google.com'
curl --head 'https://google.com'
curl 'https://google.com'

Debug curl command for each request is still available with --verbose option but --curl makes it easy to get instead of grepping the standard error.

Speaking of debug curl command, we have also added it to JSON and HTML report, nice!

Shorter Syntax for Sections

With this new version, we have made the syntax a little shorter for sections: instead of [QueryStringParams] we can
use [Query] now, [FormParams] becomes [Form] and [MultipartFormData] becomes [Multipart].

POST https://foo.com/login
[Form]
user: alice
password: secret
token: 1234578
HTTP 302


GET https://foo.com/search
[Query]
q: Mbappé
HTTP 200

Shorter names make a nicer Hurl file and are simpler to remember. We will support longer sections names for a long time
of course, but we'll remove them someday! For the moment, documentation is still using longer names and, progressively,
it will be updated with shorter names.

Others

In this new version we have implemented two curl options:

• --limit-rate: limit request to the specified speed in bytes per second. This option is available as a CLI option
  and can be set on a specific request

• --connect-timeout: maximum time that connections are allowed to take. This option is set in seconds, but can also
  use [time units] like 10s, 20000ms etc...

  GET https://foo.com
  [Options]
  connect-timeout: 30s
  limit-rate: 32000

Speaking of CLI options, help in hurl --help has been redesigned and categorized, to make it a little more readable.

We have also fixed a lot of bugs: a particular one was a nasty (but rare) bug in our parallel implementation.
Shout-out to Lambros Petrou for having identified this one: TLDR, don't exit a main entry point program when there
are still living threads... Lambros is the mind behind Skybear.NET, a managed platform to automate HTTP API
testing. Give it a try, it's really powerful, simple and super cool (besides using Hurl of course!)

There are a lot of other improvements with Hurl 6.0.0 and also a lot of bug fixes, you can check the complete list of
enhancements and bug fixes in our release note.

We'll be happy to hear from you, either for enhancement requests or for sharing your success story using Hurl!