[jicea]

We’re using Hurl [1] at work for integration tests with very good success. We’ve eliminated false positive or flacky tests: it’s a simple tool that runs HTTP requests and you can add asserts on responses.

It’s as if you would test your app with curl, very fast and reliable. On the other hand, contrary to Selenium, there is no Javascript engine so you can only test the “raw” DOM or json response sent by the network (and not a DOM managed and rendered by a Javascript front end framework).

(Disclaimer: I’m one of Hurl maintainer)

[1]: https://hurl.dev

[brimstedt]

Seems hurl is quite a different thing than browser automation though?

API/request level testing is great when appropriate, but testing what happens in browser won't be possible without using something like selenium, nightwatch or playwright

[jicea]

Yes totally.

On the other hand, you can also easily test use cases where the browser is “helping” you (for instance, you want to test that your backend didn’t accept an invalid email, but your HTML form has HTML5 validation that prevents a user to enter an invalid email). Or you want to test HttpsOnly cookie attributes. But it can’t do UI integration tests.