Hurl: a friendly CLI companion for your web request tests

An alternative to Postman

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash

There are excellent solutions that exist to test web applications and APIs. To name just a few: Selenium, Playwright, Postman, and Hoppscotch. They work well, if you are satisfied with that, you may not need to read the rest of this article. But if you are a die-hard CLI (Command Line Interface) lover or just curious, you may be happy to know that there is a solution allowing you to test almost all features you have in the previous tools listed. It is called Hurl and is based on libcurl, the library behind the legendary curl command.

Installation

The installation instructions depend on your platform.

On Linux, there are different ways to install it, one of them is to download a pre-compiled binary and add it to your path.

$ INSTALL_DIR=/tmp
$ curl -silent --location https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/download/3.0.0/hurl-3.0.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz | tar xvz -C $INSTALL_DIR
$ export PATH=$INSTALL_DIR/hurl-3.0.0:$PATH

On Ubuntu / Debian

$ curl --location --remote-name https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/download/3.0.0/hurl_3.0.0_amd64.deb$
$ sudo apt update && apt install ./hurl_3.0.0_amd64.deb