curl-runner 2.0 — rewritten in Rust on libcurl

API tests as YAML.
Run them anywhere.

Describe requests in plain YAML, validate every response, and run whole suites in parallel — on your laptop or in CI. One native binary, no runtime.

Get started Read the docs

curl -fsSL https://www.curl-runner.com/install.sh | bash

api.yaml

global:
  variables:
    BASE: https://api.example.com
  execution: parallel

requests:
  - name: List users
    url: ${BASE}/users
    expect:
      status: 200
      responseTime: "< 500"

  - name: Create user
    url: ${BASE}/users
    method: POST
    body: { name: Ada }
    retry: { count: 3 }
    expect:
      status: 201

terminal

$ curl-runner api.yaml
ℹ Found 1 YAML file(s)
ℹ Processing: api.yaml

✓ List users [api]
   ├─ GET: https://api.example.com/users
   ├─ ✓ Status: 200
   └─ Duration: 84ms | 2.10 KB

✓ Create user [api]
   ├─ POST: https://api.example.com/users
   ├─ ✓ Status: 201
   └─ Duration: 112ms | 96.00 B

Summary: 2 requests completed successfully

Example request timings are illustrative.

Install withbrewnpmbunpnpmcargoinstall.shPowerShell

Features

Everything an API suite needs. Nothing it doesn’t.

yaml
Plain YAML suites
Requests, headers, bodies and uploads in files your team can review in a pull request.
expect
Response validation
Assert status, headers, body fields and response time. Failures say exactly what differed.
parallel
Parallel or sequential
Run a whole directory at once, or in order when requests depend on each other.
store / when
Chained requests
Store values from one response, reuse them in the next, and run steps conditionally.
retry
Retries and timeouts
Per-request retries with delays, and real millisecond timeouts for slow endpoints.
snapshot
Snapshots and diffs
Save a baseline, then see what changed between runs or environments.
--profile
Performance profiling
Repeat requests, measure latency percentiles and export the results.
--watch
Watch mode
Re-run the suite every time a YAML file changes while you build the API.
convert
From curl to YAML
Paste a curl command or a shell script and get a ready-to-run suite back.

Native

libcurl inside.
Rust around it.

The same battle-tested transfer engine as curl, statically linked into a single binary. HTTP/2, the operating system’s trust store, and nothing to install first — not Node, not Bun, not even curl.

static binary per platform: 1
runtime dependencies: 0
startup: < 7 ms
peak memory, 100 requests: 13.5 MB

Median of repeated runs on an Apple M2 Max against a local server. Reproduce with scripts/bench.sh.

.github/workflows/api.yml

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v7
  - run: curl -fsSL https://www.curl-runner.com/install.sh | bash
  - run: curl-runner tests/ --strict-exit --output results.json

CI-ready

Smoke tests that fail the build — for the right reasons.

Deterministic exit codes, failure thresholds, retries for flaky networks, and one JSON report for every file in the run. Drop it into any pipeline.

Studio · Preview

The same YAML,
in a native app.

curl-runner studio opens a folder of request files as a collection. Edit with live validation, run one request or all of them, and read every check, retry and timing. A macOS preview for now: no download yet, you build it from source.

Explore the studio What’s new in 2.2.0