wrk

1 post with the tag “wrk”

How to install wrk on linux system?

Jan 1, 2025

Cowrie

Dev @ Bswen

1. Purpose

In this post, I will demo how to install wrk, a web url performance test tool on linux/unix/mac systems.

What is wrk test tool

WRK is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool designed to measure the performance of web servers. It is similar to older tools like ab (ApacheBench) or siege, but it comes with some additional features that make it more powerful and flexible.

WRK is typically used to:

• Benchmark the performance of web servers.
• Test the scalability of web applications under load.

2. The solution

2.1 How to install wrk?

On linux systems, to ensures that your package manager (APT) has the most up-to-date information about available packages, versions, and dependencies, we should update the local cache first:

root@launch-advisor-20191120:/etc/nginx# apt update
....

Then we install the wrk tool using apt install command:

root@launch-advisor-20191120:/etc/nginx# apt install wrk
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package wrk

You can see that we got an error E: Unable to locate package wrk, why?

Why we got Unable to locate package wrk error

The error you’re encountering happens because the wrk package is not available in the default repositories of your system’s package manager (apt). The wrk tool, a modern HTTP benchmarking tool, is not typically included in the default Ubuntu/Debian repositories.

And wrk can only run on Unix-like systems. Such as linux, mac, solaris, etc. It can only be compiled on these systems.

So we can install it from source:

Download wrk source code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev git -y
git clone https://github.com/wg/wrk.git wrk

Then build it:

cd wrk
sudo make

Then we can use the binary:

# move the wrk executable to your PATH
sudo cp wrk /usr/local/bin

2.2 Verify the installation of wrk

root@launch-advisor-20191120:~/wrk# wrk
Usage: wrk <options> <url>
  Options:
    -c, --connections <N>  Connections to keep open
    -d, --duration    <T>  Duration of test
    -t, --threads     <N>  Number of threads to use

    -s, --script      <S>  Load Lua script file
    -H, --header      <H>  Add header to request
        --latency          Print latency statistics
        --timeout     <T>  Socket/request timeout
    -v, --version          Print version details

  Numeric arguments may include a SI unit (1k, 1M, 1G)
  Time arguments may include a time unit (2s, 2m, 2h)
root@launch-advisor-20191120:~/wrk#

It works.

3. Summary

In this post, I demonstrated how to install wrk , a great performance test tool . That’s it, thanks for your reading.

Final Words + More Resources

My intention with this article was to help others who might be considering solving such a problem. So I hope that’s been the case here. If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me by email: Email me

Here are also the most important links from this article along with some further resources that will help you in this scope:

• 👨‍💻 wg/wrk: Modern HTTP benchmarking tool

Oh, and if you found these resources useful, don’t forget to support me by starring the repo on GitHub!

Tags:

• sys
• wrk