k6-go

k6-go makes it easy to run load tests written in golang with k6. To achieve this it uses xk6 and the xk6-g0 extension.

the problem

Although k6's officially supported scripting language is JavaScript, since xk6-g0 was born, writing scripts in golang became possible. xk6-go can handle simple go scripts out of the box with the help of yaegi interpreter, but if you want to use subpackages, or 3rd party packages (like a generated openapi client), the situation became harder. It is possible, to install additional packages to the yaegi interpreter (described here), but the procedure is not developer friendly.

the solution

k6-go detects the dependencies of the go script, and generates the extension, that uses the RegisterExports function of xk6-go, to build the needed packages into a custom k6 binary on the fly.

installing k6-go

go install github.com/bandorko/k6-go@latest

running test

k6-go runs the custom k6 binary after building it, so you can use k6-go with the same parameters as k6.

k6-go run -i 10 -u 3 script.go
k6-go help run

If you want to build only the custom k6 binary, then you can use the build subcommand

k6-go build --output custom-k6 script.go

environment variables

k6-go supports the following environment variables of xk6:

• K6_VERSION
• XK6_K6_REPO
• XK6_RACE_DETECTOR
• XK6_SKIP_CLEANUP

More information : https://github.com/grafana/xk6#environment-variables

example

petstore-load-k6 is an example load test project written in golang

asciicast (example run)