Issue 152  1st March 2019

How to use Gradle and Gatling to automate the load tests of a Spring Boot web service

This is a comprehensive tutorial that explains how to automate the load tests of a Spring Boot based RESTful Web Service using Gatling together with Gradle. You will learn how to combine all the above tools and automate the load testing by defining tasks which can become part of a CI/CD build pipeline.

Although, this does tutorial does not use any Gatlin Gradle plugin, I learned a couple of tricks. Specially the use of gradle-process. More below.

Gradle Processes Plugin

This Gradle plugin provides the capability to create forked processes from a Gradle build. It's primary goal is to bolster the built in capabilities of Gradle which allow for processing forking only in a synchronous manner.

Let me give you an example:

task startMicronaut(type: JavaFork) {
    classpath = sourceSets.main.runtimeClasspath
    main = 'example.micronaut.Application'
 }
startMicronaut.dependsOn assemble

task stopMicronaut {
    doLast {
        startMicronaut.processHandle.abort()
    }
}

Gatling Plugin for Gradle

This is the Gradle plugin end-up using.