UPDATE: You can find the information about the JMeter Maven plugin here

Recently my co-worker James suggested we automate our tests on our project using JMeter and gave me his webpage about the trials and tribulations he went through to get it set up. It linked to a wiki page, in which someone had created a JMeter plugin for Maven.

Well awesome, it shouldn’t be too hard to set up. And it wasn’t, I had the JMeter tests up and running in a short amount of time. But one of the problems was that I wanted to set it up in a more generic way so that we could define different parameters on each of the CI environments we ran.

For this task, I first tried using filtering in maven, which I got working. But what you end up with is a JMX file that is basically unusable by default in JMeter. If you ever wanted to run it again standalone in JMeter, you’d have to modify the variables in the JMX file to work correctly. Vice versa, if you set up your test using JMeter, you have to remember to modify it so that the maven variables you need are in the places you need them.

JMeter already has a system in it where you can define variables in the JMX files (and give them defaults, fancy la la!). For example, say you want to define a variable for a host name. Inside your JMeter JMX file, you can do something like this:

    ${__P(someVariableName, localhost)}

Now, you have defined someVariableName to be a variable within your JMX file. The second value, in this case localhost, is the default if no variable override has been given.

The way to override these variables is with the -J option on the command, in this form:

    -JsomeVariableName=yourhost.com

and all the variables called someVariableName will have the value yourhost.com. Now, with the minor modifications I have made to the JMeter Maven plugin, you can now define the values for these variables inside of your pom.xml, like so:

<jmeterUserProperties>
      <someVariableName>yourhost.com</someVariableName>
</jmeterUserProperties>
and it is just the same as using -J on the JMeter command line. The way we’re actually going to use it is to combine it with maven variables, like so: 
<jmeterUserProperties>
      <someVariableName>${ourhostname}</someVariableName>
</jmeterUserProperties>

So now, we can just do:

    mvn -Dourhostname=ourspecialhost ...

and be able to run site specific JMeter tests with only changing the arguments on the command-line.

I will be putting together a page in the next day or so with all the libraries needed to set this up, similar to the wiki page.