Jikken CLI v0.7 Released!

Published on: 2024-04-05 by Louis Russo

We’re pleased to announce a new major milestone for Jikken! This release contains a number of new features and improvements to assist in creating and working with Jikken test files. While some of these features are only partially complete, we hope that they are already at a stage to be useful. We will continue to refine and improve these features, as well as introduce new ones to expand the overall usefulness of our tools. As Jikken usage continues to grow, we’ve had some amazing feedback and suggestions from our users. While we have a clear vision for where we’d like to see Jikken evolve, your feedback can help provide prioritization of which aspects of the product we improve next. As always, if you have any feedback (good or bad), feel free to contact us, open an issue on Github, or even fork the repo and create a pull-request.

Thanks for all your support.

New Features

  1. JUnit Output: Jikken CLI can now generate JUnit test output files! This enables seamless integration with many 3rd party tools and providers, including most CI/CD platforms.

  2. OpenAPI Spec Ingestion: Jikken CLI can now generate JKT test files from inspecting OpenAPI specifications! This feature is still early in its development, but we’ve had a number of beta users leverage it to speed up their Jikken test onboarding. For the latest feature details, check out our docs. And be on the lookout for future enhancements, as we plan to quickly iterate and improve this feature based on user feedback.

  3. VSCode Extension: We’ve released an official VSCode extension (which can be found by searching for jikken). The initial release provides basic syntax highlighting support when looking at JKT files, but we plan on more advanced functionality in the future. Do you have ideas or suggestions? Feel free to submit them via github or our contact form.

  4. New Commmand - List: With the new list command, you can easily search and find test files in your selected directory structure. The feature supports the same filtering capabilities as the run command and provides some visualizations when you begin working with a larger collection of tests.

  5. JKT Schema improvements: We’ve made a number of improvements to the jikken test file schema. These include

    • Support for variable embeddings inside request bodies.
    • A new disable field to temporarily disable a test file from running.
    • A new description field for inmproved documentation and visualizations in our webapp.
    • A new delay field for test stages which allows pausing after a stage. This can be useful for some asynchronous workloads.

  6. An ignore file: The CLI tool now supports having a .jikkenignore file to toggle disabling individual tests or directories of tests for test execution. For more details check out our documentation.

New Improvements

  1. Auth Header Redaction: The CLI tool now automatically redacts header details when streaming telemetry to our web platform. Previously if you had used variables for the auth header they were already being redacted, but now even if you hardcode a secret/key/token in the header it will also be redacted upon telemetry transmission. We still recommend that you use variables instead of hardcoding credentials in test files, but now it will also redact those values from telemetry payloads. As always, unless you configure an API Key for your Jikken account, we will not collect any telemetry data.

  2. Console Output Improvements: We’ve made several changes to the default CLI output.

    • Improved messaging around which tests are executing, which are being skipped, and why.
    • Improved default messaging so that errors/details print after the initial test pass/fail line.

  3. Process Exit Codes: The CLI tool now provides different exit codes when test run execution fails vs. when it passes.

What’s next

Our next big initiatives for the CLI tool include more complex variable generators, data validation (fuzzy response specifications), and parallel test execution. We’ll also be working on further refining the OpenAPI Spec ingestion, as well as the VSCode extension.