Ask a Flooder 05: How do I get started with Flood Element?

Originally posted here.

On this Ask a Flooder, I talk about getting started with Flood Element. Element is an open-source tool that is a good Selenium alternative for browser-based load testing. It runs Puppeteer under the hood to drive real browsers at scale and can be paired with Flood for cloud load testing.

TRANSCRIPT:

If you’re sold on browser-based load testing and want to get started on Element, I think the easiest way to do that is by going to element.flood.io and clicking on Install on the upper left corner. You can follow those instructions to get started, and you can also click on the links on the left side if you get stuck.

Once Element is installed, open up the directory and look at the examples folder. There you’ll find a lot of sample scripts that we’ve already made up for you. The easiest way to get started is to just modify some of these slightly so that you’re testing your site. For example, you could just change the URL and step names to make it appropriate for what you’re testing.

Then, you can run it locally using the command element run the name of your test script, like test.ts, and then I also like to include the no-headless flag.

element run test.ts --no-headless

The no-headless flag is going to run a real browser, a Chromium browser, on your machine, so that you can see what the script is actually doing. This is a great way to debug and troubleshoot.

Once you’re ready to run your load test on the cloud, you can simply drag and drop your Element script into the Flood stream editor and then start your load test as usual.

Check out the links in the description below for more information about Element, how to get started, and how to run an Element script on Flood.

More about Element

Getting started with Element

See Also