Installing Artillery Pro

What you'll learn

• How to install Artillery Pro CLI components
• How to deploy Artillery Pro backend in your organization's AWS account

Overview

Artillery Pro adds cloud-native performance testing to Artillery. It provides a self-service performance testing platform that runs in your organization's own AWS account.

Components

Artillery Pro is comprised of two main components:

1. CLI extensions, i.e. additional commands which are added to the artillery CLI, such as run-test. These commands let you create and run tests, manage your team's subscription, etc.

   To make these CLI commands available to artillery CLI, the artillery-pro package needs to be installed by every user that will run tests with Artillery Pro (including machine users, such as jobs in a CI/CD pipeline).

2. Artillery Pro backend, which is deployed into an AWS account, and takes care of scheduling & running tests from ECS/Fargate clusters, storing test results, and other heavy lifting. The backend only needs to be deployed once and only upgraded with new releases of Artillery Pro. Artillery Pro backend is fully serverless by default, i.e. it only makes use of fully-managed AWS services such as DynamoDB, S3, and SQS. There are no servers or VMs for your team to set up and manage, and everything is created on-demand for running tests.

The CLI interacts with the backend to create and run tests. The CLI also provides a way deploy the backend to an AWS account in the first place, and to upgraded it to new releases.

info

A license key is required only for deploying the backend. Once Artillery Pro is deployed to an AWS account, AWS IAM is used for access control and to determine who can run tests with Artillery Pro.

Access control and security

Artillery Pro CLI uses the same access mechanisms as the official AWS CLI.

Artillery Pro uses the official AWS SDK, which uses standard AWS cryptographic signing mechanisms to protect your security credentials and communication between the CLI and the backend.

Requirements

• Artillery Core needs to be installed before setting up or using Artillery Pro.
• An active subscription or a trial license key. Please see Artillery Pro's product page for more information on Artillery Pro, and on requesting a trial license.

Installing CLI commands

Install the artillery-pro package to add extra commands to the artillery CLI.

Install both with:

npm install -g artillery@latest artillery-pro@latest

You can check that the installation was successful by running:

artillery --version

You should see the version of Artillery Pro in the output:

        ___         __  _ ____
  _____/   |  _____/ /_(_) / /__  _______  __ ___
 /____/ /| | / ___/ __/ / / / _ \/ ___/ / / /____/
/____/ ___ |/ /  / /_/ / / /  __/ /  / /_/ /____/
    /_/  |_/_/   \__/_/_/_/\___/_/   \__  /
                                    /____/


VERSION INFO:

Artillery Core: 2.0.0
Artillery Pro:  3.0.0-4

Node.js: v17.3.0
OS:      darwin

Deploying the backend

Get a license key

A valid license key is required to deploy the backend for the first time.

The key is sent via email when the subscription is created. A copy of the key can also be requested with the artillery CLI:

artillery subscription --email user@example.net

(The email addressed used to set up the subscription must be used. It may take a couple of minutes for the email to arrive.)

Deploy the backend with artillery deploy

The deploy command is used to deploy the backend and to upgrade it to new releases.

artillery deploy is safe to run multiple times (i.e. it's idempotent). If everything has already been installed, it will simply do nothing and exit.

Artillery Pro uses CloudFormation to create the AWS resources it needs. Stack events will be printed to the terminal as the deployment is progressing. You can also follow its progress via CloudFormation UI in AWS Console.

info

Artillery Pro can be deployed to only one region in an AWS account. Once the Artillery Pro backend is deployed to an AWS region, running artillery deploy with different AWS region in the same AWS account will fail and may require you to re-deploy the backend to the original AWS region.

See the docs for the deploy command for a full description of various flags it supports.

Example

To deploy Artillery Pro backend in us-east-1 with the license key stored in ~/artillery-pro-license-key.txt:

artillery deploy --region us-east-1 --license-key-file ~/artillery-pro-license-key.txt

Upgrade an existing installation

To upgrade an existing installation, pass the --upgrade flag to deploy:

artillery deploy --upgrade --region us-east-1

If you're updating the license key (for example after upgrading your team's plan), pass it along with the --license-key-file flag:

artillery deploy --upgrade --region us-east-1 --license-key-file ~/artillery-pro-license-key.txt

Supported regions

Artillery Pro may be deployed in any of the 16 supported following AWS regions. For a full up-to-date list please see Supported regions.

Setting up IAM Permissions

Users of the artillery CLI will require adequate IAM permissions to be able to interact with the backend.

The deploy command creates a ready-to-use IAM policy which may be attached to existing IAM roles to allow users that assume those roles to interact with Artillery Pro. The deploy will print the name of that role after Artillery Pro is deployed successfully.

Artillery uses the AWS SDK to acquire AWS credentials from the environment (including support for AWS SSO). Please see Configuring the AWS CLI if you need more information on configuring AWS access credentials.