CI pipelines

perfscale runs headless by design, so it drops straight into a CI pipeline: the run summary goes to stdout, the exit code gates the job, and --summary-export writes a machine-readable JSON (or a Markdown table for the job summary UI) for downstream steps.

GitHub Actions

The official composite action — Perfscale/github-action — installs a pinned perfscale release (checksum-verified against the release's sha256sums.txt), runs your test, renders the metric table into the job summary, and packs the summary + metrics into a zip artifact:

- uses: Perfscale/github-action@v1
  id: loadtest
  with:
    file: test.yaml        # native engine; or: k6 / locust / jmeter
    config: config.yaml
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
  with:
    name: perfscale-output
    path: ${{ steps.loadtest.outputs.output-file }}

One input per engine — k6, locust, jmeter, or file (native) — maps to the matching perfscale run flag. Engine binaries stay the workflow's responsibility (the action installs perfscale itself): k6/locust are one-package installs, JMeter needs Java (preinstalled on GitHub-hosted runners) plus the distribution tarball — the action's README has a copy-paste install step.

Useful outputs for gating: summary-json (requests, RPS, latency percentiles, error rate + engine/VUs/duration metadata) and exit-code:

- name: Gate on p95
  run: |
    p95=$(jq '.summary.p95_ms' "${{ steps.loadtest.outputs.summary-json }}")
    awk "BEGIN { exit !(${p95} < 500) }" || { echo '::error::p95 over budget'; exit 1; }

Live demo: Perfscale/perfscale-demo is a public playground repo — every push runs the native and JMeter engines against a local target and publishes the job-summary tables and artifacts, so you can see the output without setting anything up.

GitLab CI

For GitLab there is a templates repo — Perfscale/gitlab-ci — with ready-made .gitlab-ci.yml includes and examples for the same engines.

Any other CI

No plugin needed — install the binary and run:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Perfscale/perfscale/releases/latest/download/perfscale-linux-amd64 \
  -o perfscale && chmod +x perfscale
./perfscale run -f test.yaml -c config.yaml \
  --summary-export summary.json

Exit codes mirror the CLI: 0 — the run completed (individual failed requests/checks don't change that — gate on summary.json instead), 1 — the run could not execute, 2 — invalid arguments. One deliberate exception: a std/thresholds@v1 gate violated at severity: fail fails the process after the summary export, so CI turns red on SLO breaches.