Smokex

Smokex is a tool to automate HTTP requests.

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Solo Founder
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Smokex provides tools to assert requests and create smoke tests, but also can be used to schedule any kind on HTTP request and keep Heroku instances up, ensure a service is alive, or move data between services #nocode

September 16, 2020 Increase free accounts limits

Smokex has PRO plans for those users that are heavy users and will rely on the tool to run smoke tests or automate any needed request.

But at this moment, I reached the free account limits to allow any registered user to use Smokex without almost any limit, so they will be able to try it out and play around with the features without being worried about limitations.

Smokex should provide a service and be helpful first.

September 2, 2020 Smokex shows on HN and ProductHunt

Yesterday we launched Smokex on Hacker News and ProductHunt to the front page! Overall it resulted in 2,000 page views and almost 20 signups 馃檪

I quickly identify some pain points regarding UX/UI issues that for sure affected the welcome for those platforms and started working on them right away.

That is for what we are here for!

August 24, 2020 Finished the Smokex MVP

After being working on the backend to handle requests and a user-friendly and light fronted, Smokex finally got to the public.

The project also increased the target users scope since it is not limited only to run smoke tests, but also has unlimited flexibility to automate any HTTP requests the user defines. This means it can be used to move data from different API, pinging your services to ensure they are up & running or sending keep-alive requests.

For the techies:

It is written exclusively in Elixir & Phoenix LiveView, I love working with them and will allow me to ensure Smokex will be ready scale to thousands and thousands of requests without any problems.

Uses WebSockets to dynamically load the components and provides a responsive and real-time experience to the user.

Currently deployed on Heroku, using Sentry to track errors and DataDog to monitor the application.

March 27, 2020 Smokex is born

I started working on Smokex, I already have some codebase and although I reused so I didn't from scratch, a lot of things are new and some needed to be rewritten.

First Smokex was intended to run integrated into a pipeline as a sidecar tool, meaning it would need to be installed and run manually via a CI/CD pipeline or script.

But in order to create a proper product, it evolved to a web application that will handle all the computation costs in its servers and provide a user a friendly interface to manage Smokex workflows, configurations, organization, etc...

March 23, 2020 Our product broke on production

One day our product broke on production. Like that, users start seeing a blank page and were not able to see the application.

We didn't know what was wrong at first, the tests were all green and the pipeline deployed the new release as any other day. And then we realized that we had deployed an empty release, all our checks failed.

Then we decided that smoke tests will help us, but we realized there was no tool to work with them.

Before Smokex, in order to achieve smoke testing you needed to, for each of your projects, set up the environment, and create the tests on your own.

About

Smokex provides tools to assert requests and create smoke tests, but also can be used to schedule any kind on HTTP request and keep Heroku instances up, ensure a service is alive, or move data between services #nocode