Our team has been busy this year making a lot of improvements to the Gatling products and today we are thrilled to announce the release of Gatling 3.11, the latest minor release of the Gatling open-core product and the engine behind the industry leading Gatling Enterprise software.
This blog post covers some of the enhancements and changes that are part of the 3.11 release, but is not comprehensive. You can find the detailed release notes, and the migration guide in the Gatling Documentation. As always, we love to hear what you think of our product, don’t hesitate to send us an email or ask for a meeting.
A new, Maven-based bundle
The Gatling standalone bundle was created to help non developers start using Gatling with a minimal installation and configuration effort. However, as time has passed, we have realized that the standalone bundle had many limitations including:
- it's not compatible with IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, eclipse or VSCode because it has a non-standard structure,
- it doesn't let the user develop professional usage skills with IDEs and build tools,
- it is a considerable effort for our team to maintain a Scala incremental compiler integration.
To address these limitations we have decided to provide a Maven wrapper-based bundle instead. This bundle ships all the necessary libraries and works offline, both for Gatling and for Maven itself. The new bundle can be used by users who don’t know how to configure Maven in their corporate network. Also, since it uses a Maven project layout, it can be easily imported in any IDE.
The new Maven-based bundle retains the interactive mode that from the earlier Gatling bundle and has most of the same functionality, but uses the Maven wrapper commands. One small note, is that the commands are slightly different depending on whether you are using Linux/MacOS or Windows. Test out the new bundle with our Introduction to Scripting tutorial!
Upgraded Maven plugin
The release of Gatling 3.11 includes the latest version of the Gatling Maven plugin 4.8.0 and requires a minimum Maven version of 3.6.3. Version 4.8.0 introduces major changes compared to the previous versions:
- The plugin runs in interactive mode by default. When you run the `gatling:test` command.
- The available simulations are listed, and you can choose the one you want to run.
- When run on a CI, the non-interactive mode is automatically activated. The run will fail if no simulation is explicitly specified.
The new behavior is intended to be better aligned with human usage locally and CI usage from a program.
Upgraded Gradle plugin
The release of Gatling 3.11 includes the latest version of the Gatling Gradle plugin 3.11.0 and requires a minimum Gradle version of 7.0. Version 3.11.0 introduces major changes compared to the previous versions:
- The plugin runs in interactive mode by default. When you run the `gatling:test` command.
- The available simulations are listed, and you can choose the one you want to run.
- When run on a CI, the non-interactive mode is automatically activated. The run will fail if no simulation is explicitly specified.
- The option ` --simulation=<FullyQualifiedClassName> ` replaces gatlingRun-<FullyQualifiedClassName> pattern to force the desired simulation.
- The Scala plugin is no longer applied automatically. Users must apply it, if needed.
- A logback conf is no longer generated when one isn’t defined.
- `logLevel` and `logHttp` have been removed and must be removed from your build.gradle file. You can see how to add the logback conf file in the Gatling demo projects.
Improved message handling for WebSocket and SSE
For Gatling users that are working with WebSocket or SSE protocols version 3.11 includes an improvement for processing unmatched messages in a non blocking way. By default Gatling does not buffer unmatched messages, but now you can enable this feature for both protocols. There are more details on how to use this functionality in the Documentation for WebSocket and SSE protocols.
Learn more about Gatling and Gatling Enterprise
The new features and functionalities in Gatling 3.11 are only a small fraction of what we have to offer to load testing professionals. We are committed to providing the best load testing solution on the market and are excited to share future developments with you. Sign up for our Product Newsletter to be the first to learn about new releases and improved resources for load testers.
