AREX

An Open Source Testing Framework with Real World Data

• Introduction
• Installation
• Getting Started
• Contributing
• License

Introduction

As your application evolves more complex, the effort required to thoroughly test against it also becomes tremendous. Arex is a framework designed around a quite straightforward principle of leveraging your real world data(i.e. database record, service payload, cache items etc.) for regression testing. Simple is powerful. The idea behind makes it incredibly powerful.

Arex provides an out-of-box agent file that could be attached to any applications with Java 8+ and dynamically weaves solid bytecode into your existing code to record the real data of live traffic, and further use and replay it for mocking, testing, and debugging purpose.

Arex is implemented with an unique mechanism for recording. Instead of being a proxy like other similar framework, Arex sits in the background without awareness of your application to record realistic data in live traffic which means that no intrusive code changes are required when integrating it to your existing application.

Arex utilizes the advanced Java technique, Instrument API, and is capable of instrumenting various libraries and frameworks which are widely used.

Libraries and frameworks supported by Arex (to be added...)

• Java Executors
• Apache HttpAsyncClient 4.x
• Apache HttpClient 4.x
• Hibernate 5.x
• MyBatis 3.x
• Spring Boot 1.4+-2.x+, Servlet API 3+

Installation

Simply download the latest binary from github or compile it by yourself.
There are two agent files provided in the arex-agent-jar folder like below. They must be placed in the same directory.

arex-agent-<version>.jar
arex-agent-bootstrap-<version>.jar

Getting Started

You can get arex started by：

Enable the instrumentation agent by configuring a javaagent flag to the JVM to run arex in local mode:

 java -javaagent:/path/to/arex-agent-<version>.jar
      -Darex.service.name=your-service-name (should be unique)
      -Darex.storge.model=local
      -jar your-application.jar

By default, Arex uses H2 as a local storage to save the recorded data for testing purpose.

Run with CLI

Simply click the script in the arex-agent-java/bin directory to start the command line tool, or run it by following java command

java -cp "/path/to/arex-cli-parent/arex-cli/target/arex-cli.jar" io.arex.cli.ArexCli

The supported commands are as follows:

• record- choose a running application and start recording live traffic
• replay- replay recorded data and view differences
  [option: -n/--num] replay numbers, default the latest 10
• watch- view replay result and differences
  [option: -r/--replayId] replay id, multiple are separated by spaces
• debug- local debugging of specific cases
  [option: -r/--recordId] record id, required Option

AREX agent works along with the AREX config service and the AREX storage service. You could just configure the host and port of them respectively, like below

java -javaagent:/path/to/arex-agent-<version>.jar
     -Darex.service.name=your-service-name
     -Darex.storage.service.host=[storage.service.host:port](storage.service.host:port) 
     -Darex.config.service.host=[config.service.host:port](config.service.host:port)
     -jar your-application.jar

Alternatively, you can put those configuration item in arex.agent.conf file, like below

arex.service.name=your-service-name  
arex.storage.service.host=<storage.service.host:port> 
arex.config.service.host=<config.service.host:port> 

Then simply run:

java -javaagent:/path/to/arex-agent-<version>.jar
     -Darex.config.path=/path/to/arex.agent.conf
     -jar your-application.jar

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch
3. Commit your code changes and push to your feature branch
4. Create a new Pull Request

License

• Code: Apache-2.0