Tip 10 – Installing Jmeter-Plugins from commandline

So, you’ve built a beautiful script, now you want to run it from one or more remote servers. These servers are setup, you downloaded the JMeter zit, unzipped it and all. Since you will be running off a server there is no big fat GUI to install the oh so needed JMeter Plugins though.

What do you do to make those work?

Thankfully since version 3.* this has become fairly easy. The JMeter Plugin Manager was introduced and with that comes the PluginsManagerCMD (be it the .bat or the .sh)

When running the PluginsManagerCMD however it is not very friendly in its messaging:

./PluginsManagerCMD.sh 
ERROR StatusLogger No log4j2 configuration file found. Using default configuration: logging only errors to the console. Set system property 'org.apache.logging.log4j.simplelog.StatusLogger.level' to TRACE to show Log4j2 internal initialization logging.
Options for tool 'PluginManagerCMD': <command> <paramstr> where <command> is one of: help, status, available, upgrades, install, install-all-except, uninstall.
ERROR: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Command parameter is missing
*** Problem's technical details go below ***
Home directory was detected as: /run/media/martijndevrieze/Data/Downloads/builds/jmeter-nightly/apache-jmeter-r1802079/lib
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Command parameter is missing
   at org.jmeterplugins.repository.PluginManagerCMD.processParams(PluginManagerCMD.java:20)
   at kg.apc.cmdtools.PluginsCMD.processParams(PluginsCMD.java:66)
   at kg.apc.cmdtools.PluginsCMD.processParams(PluginsCMD.java:22)
   at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
   at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
   at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
   at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
   at kg.apc.cmd.UniversalRunner.main(UniversalRunner.java:105)

So, what exactly are you supposed to do with this script?

Somewhere in between the errors is a useage message:

Options for tool 'PluginManagerCMD': <command> <paramstr> where <command> is one of: help, status, available, upgrades, install, install-all-except, uninstall.

As it turns out, you can get this info with a bit less error information when running the simple command:

./PluginsManagerCMD.sh help

I started out with checking the status of the PluginsManager:

./PluginsManagerCMD.sh status
ERROR StatusLogger No log4j2 configuration file found. Using default configuration: logging only errors to the console. Set system property 'org.apache.logging.log4j.simplelog.StatusLogger.level' to TRACE to show Log4j2 internal initialization logging.
[jpgc-plugins-manager=0.12, jmeter-core=r1802079, jmeter-ftp=r1802079, jmeter-http=r1802079, jmeter-jdbc=r1802079, jmeter-jms=r1802079, jmeter-junit=r1802079, jmeter-java=r1802079, jmeter-ldap=r1802079, jmeter-mail=r1802079, jmeter-mongodb=r1802079, jmeter-native=r1802079, jmeter-tcp=r1802079, jmeter-components=r1802079]

We now have an overview of the plugins installed in JMeter, nothing out of the standard packaged set.

Now let’s install some plugins, for that the following command is needed:

./PluginsManagerCMD.sh install  <paramstr>

Where the <paramstr> needs to be filled with something sensible. This something sensible is the ID of the plugin you want to install.

You can find the ID’s on the Jmeter-Plugins site in the menu item “Browse plugins”. Look at the plugin(s) you need and grab the accompanying ID:

For the sake of this example the command will be:

./PluginsManagerCMD.sh install websocket-samplers

Unfortunately JMeter will not provide you any feedback while running this. The only easy way to verify that the plugin is there is by either running the script that needs this plugin, or checking your jmeter lib/ext directory:

ls ../lib/ext/
ApacheJMeter_components.jar ApacheJMeter_http.jar ApacheJMeter_junit.jar ApacheJMeter_native.jar readme.txt
ApacheJMeter_core.jar ApacheJMeter_java.jar ApacheJMeter_ldap.jar ApacheJMeter_tcp.jar
ApacheJMeter_ftp.jar ApacheJMeter_jdbc.jar ApacheJMeter_mail.jar jmeter-plugins-manager-0.12.jar
ApacheJMeter_functions.jar ApacheJMeter_jms.jar ApacheJMeter_mongodb.jar JMeterWebSocketSamplers-0.10.jar