Requirements

• In order to write load tests, you must first install Rust.

• Goose load tests are managed with Cargo, the Rust package manager.

• Goose sets no minimum Rust version in its Cargo.toml. With the newest releases of its dependencies, Goose 0.19 needs rustc 1.88.0 or later: some of them, such as cookie_store, which Reqwest uses for cookies, require it. Use a current stable Rust.

• Building Goose compiles aws-lc-rs, the cryptography library behind its TLS support, which needs a C compiler. See its build requirements.

TLS

Goose makes requests with Reqwest 0.13, whose default TLS backend is rustls, so a load test needs no OpenSSL. The clients Goose builds check certificates with rustls-platform-verifier, which uses the operating system’s certificate store, so they trust a CA you have added to the system. They check certificates unless you accept invalid ones with --accept-invalid-certs, GooseDefault::AcceptInvalidCerts or accept_invalid_certs(true) on a GooseClientBuilder. Accept invalid certificates only for a test server with a self signed or expired certificate.

Goose builds the certificate verifier once per process, with the first of its clients set to check certificates, even when the target is plain HTTP and no certificate is ever checked. At that moment, Goose takes the process default rustls crypto provider, or aws-lc-rs if there is none. If you install a provider, do it at the start of main, before any Goose call. On Linux, the verifier also reads the system’s root certificates at that moment, so restart the load test process to trust a CA added later.

Goose before 0.19 used Reqwest 0.12 and native TLS by default, with rustls through the rustls-tls feature. In 0.19 the rustls-tls feature still exists, so a Cargo.toml that enables it keeps building, but the feature does not change which TLS library HTTP requests use.

Goose does not enable Reqwest’s http2 feature, but any reqwest 0.13 dependency with default features turns it on, including one that another crate pulls in. cargo tree -e features -i [email protected] shows whether it is on. Since 0.19.2, the clients Goose builds, including those from GooseClientBuilder, use HTTP/1.1 over rustls whenever they check certificates, even if http2 or Reqwest’s native-tls feature is on. Before 0.19.2, these clients used HTTP/2 with an HTTPS server that offered it when http2 was on, and native TLS when native-tls was on. Clients from GooseUser::set_client_builder, and the clients Goose builds that accept invalid certificates, can use HTTP/2 when http2 is on and native TLS when native-tls is on.

To keep HTTP/2 or native TLS with certificate checks, pass a reqwest::ClientBuilder to GooseUser::set_client_builder, as A Client Without Cookies shows. The reqwest dependency line in that section turns default features off, so add features = ["http2"] or features = ["native-tls"] to it. A client from your ClientBuilder replaces Goose’s defaults for that user, so set the ones you need on your builder, such as the timeout, or .cookie_store(true) for cookies. On Linux, each such client over rustls reads the system’s root certificates when Reqwest builds it, so it is slower to build than the clients Goose builds.

Features

Goose has these Cargo features:

For example, to build a load test with the dashboard:

[dependencies]
goose = { version = "^0.19", features = ["dashboard"] }

Chrome for PDF reports

A .pdf --report-file needs the pdf-reports feature and a Chrome or Chromium browser to render the report. Goose uses the browser the CHROME environment variable names, then an installed Chrome, Chromium or Edge, and otherwise downloads a Chrome for Testing headless shell once into the user cache directory, which needs unzip (tar on Windows) and, on Linux, glibc. See PDF report system requirements.

--pdf-print-html writes a print-ready HTML report to turn into a PDF in any browser, and needs neither Chrome nor the pdf-reports feature.