I have been using JMeter for load testing and I needed to create a custom plugin to handle parsing JSON results but I couldn’t find a simple guide how to do this. I wanted a simple solution that didn’t require manual installation in my repository or a repository manager such as Nexus.

Building the plugin

Building a plugin using maven is easy, simply add the following to your pom:

	installation directory of jmeter



	
		org.apache.jmeter
		jmeter-core
		2.3.4
		system
		${jmeter.home}/lib/ext/ApacheJMeter_core.jar
	
	
		org.apache.jmeter
		jmeter-jorphan
		2.3.4
		system
		${jmeter.home}/lib/jorphan.jar
	

You probably want to put jmeter.home in your settings.xml instead.

Testing the plugin

Whenever I develop something I want to have a quick build/test cycle. In this case I want to to start the JMeter UI without having to update the JMeter installation or any other manual work. I didn’t get chronos to add my plugin to the UI. It seems chronos copied the jar files to JMETER_HOME/lib/junit and this probably works for running an already created test, but not for creating the test. I also failed to the the maven exec plugin to create the command line arguments I needed. Instead I added a small ant script to start JMeter:

  
    
      org.apache.maven.plugins
      maven-antrun-plugin
      
        
          
          
            
          
        
      
    
  

To run the jmeter gui simply run mvn antrun:run. This only works for Windows, I leave other platforms as an exercise to the reader :-).

Using the plugin

I ended up copying the plugin jar and dependencies to the JMeter installation and used then this modified JMeter distribution when performing the tests. The reason was that I didn’t have maven installed on some of the test clients. To copy dependencies you can use mvn dependency:copy-dependencies.
If you want to run JMeter using maven you probably want to look at chronos (although it is not released it seems to work fine):

Using Maven Chronos Without an External JMeter Install

Automated performance testing using JMeter and Maven