Introducing RoboHydra — Opera’s Open-Source HTTP Client Test Tool

We'd like you to meet RoboHydra - a web server designed to help you test any kind of HTTP-based client. RoboHydra is easy to configure to return the responses you want, mimicking any server behaviour needed to test your clients.

Usecases include:

  • Testing how the client behaves when it receives a certain combination of valid (but possibly uncommon or cumbersome to reproduce) data
  • Being able to easily reproduce race conditions
  • Checking how the client behaves when the server returns Internal Server Error or invalid data
  • Simulating server connection latency when connecting to a real server

Take a look at the screencasts for more information on how to use RoboHydra while we're preparing some tutorial articles.

The code is Copyright 2012 Esteban Manchado Velázquez, and is released on Github under the Apache 2.0 license. Jacob Rask did all the CSS for the admin interface.

The project started at Opera as an internal tool to test some of our projects. Large parts of this code were (and still are) developed there, but as it’s pretty generic we decided to open source it. See Opera’s GitHub account for more open source goodies.