gloabl state for oauth 2.0 tokens

[anthony-nhs]

I am trying to set up a load test against a rest API endpoint that uses OAuth 2.0 authentication. The token is valid for 10 minutes and I want to re-use the token as much as possible so I am testing the API rather than the authentication part.

We are running our tests on fargate.

I am using a modified version of the example at https://github.com/artilleryio/artillery/tree/main/examples/generating-vu-tokens to have a before block which gets the token. This works great initially, but the issue I am struggling with is how to get and store a new token when the initial token expires, so that the new token is used by other vusers.

When I initially get the token, I store the expiry time in a variable. Before I make each request I check the expiry time, and if needed I can fetch a new token and then store the new token and expiry time in context.vars

If the initial token has expired and I get a new one, this is only made available to that vuser. As soon as the initial token expires, each call makes a request to get a new token

Is there a way to have some kind of global state that I can store an OAuth 2.0 token in and get a new one and store it so that is available to all subsequent calls. I am aware that there will be a spike of calls to get a new token when an existing one expires, but as long as one of the new tokens is stored that should be fine

[bernardobridge]

Hey @anthony-nhs 👋

You can probably use a modification of our Refresh Auth Token example.

If you do something like this in the processor:

const TOKEN_REFRESH_INTERVAL = 1000 * 5; // 5 seconds
let TOKEN_EXPIRY_TIME;
let vuToken;

export async function refreshTokenIfNeeded(requestParams, vuContext, events) {
  if (!TOKEN_EXPIRY_TIME || TOKEN_EXPIRY_TIME < Date.now()) {
    console.log('Fetching new token');
    vuToken = await fetchToken();
    TOKEN_EXPIRY_TIME = Date.now() + TOKEN_REFRESH_INTERVAL;
    console.log('  expiry time:', TOKEN_EXPIRY_TIME);
    console.log('  new token:', vuContext.vars.authToken);
  } else {
    console.log('  using existing token')
  }
  vuContext.vars.authToken = vuToken;
}

async function fetchToken() {
  // Return a dummy token for the sake of this example. A real-world
  // implementation would usually fetch a token from an external endpoint.
  return `token-${Date.now()}`;
}

Then the vuToken variable would work as the global state you're looking for. Like you said, you would still get a spike of calls during expiration, but then subsequent VU's should use the single token.

[anthony-nhs]

Thats exactly what I wanted - thanks