automation / scripting

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

I now have a local hosted version of webpagetest running on my PC. This uses urlBlast to fire up the pagetest.ext app. (For some reason on my PC it doesn’t work in IE7 as the CIEHook plug-in prevents my browser from connecting to any website). So I’m using pagetest.exe for now.

Now I would like to extend this further, and use the scripting capability that is provided: (See
Pagetest download | SourceForge.net)

Is it possible to automate this? So either:

  1. Can I access a restful URL where I point the locally hosted version of webpagetest at a script on my machine? Or,
  2. Can I get URLBlast to run a script, or
  3. Something else that I’ve missed!

Whatever the solution, I need an approach that I can automate.

It’s also worth noting that because (for some odd reason) I can’t get urlBlast to work with IE, the solution will have to use pagestest.exe.

Finally, once all this is up and running, where can I go to get the data from my tests?

Many thanks in advance,
Martin

2

You can automate the submitting of tests and getting results using the http API: http://www.webpagetest.org/docs/Automating_Pagetest

The web hosted version is really only good at presenting results for a single step though. If you want to record a series of transactions and do bulk testing you can use urlblast directly (without the web front end) by changing from mode 4 to mode 2 but that support is not really documented well. Running in that mode you provide it a list of urls (or scripts) you want tested and tell it where to put the results. It will keep cycling through the list on whatever interval you specify and save the page and transaction data in tab-delimited files. There’s no UI for presenting the results in this mode though, just the raw data.

If you’re interested in running urlblast directly let me know and I’ll see if I can throw together some docs.