Install locust with Homebrew, apt

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• locust

Project history

Locust's official history page says it was created out of frustration with existing tools such as Apache JMeter and Tsung. The objection was both ergonomic and architectural: graphical point-and-click test design made complex scenarios hard to maintain, and thread-bound approaches limited concurrency.

The project was created in 2011 by Carl Bystrom and Jonatan Heyman while they were working on Battlelog, the companion app for Battlefield 3. That origin explains Locust's emphasis on simulating many concurrent users while keeping test behavior programmable.

The official repository describes Locust as an open source performance/load testing tool for HTTP and other protocols, with tests defined in regular Python code. Its docs grew to cover configuration files, distributed load generation, Docker, headless operation, web UI customization, and hosted load testing.

Adoption history

Locust adoption spread among Python teams and service developers who wanted load tests in the same language and version-control workflow as application code. The official Locust Cloud retrospective describes the project as reaching thirteen years and tens of millions of downloads, indicating broad use beyond its original game-service context.

The 1.0 release was a significant API cleanup: the changelog documents renaming `Locust` and `HttpLocust` classes to `User` and `HttpUser`, changing client-count terminology to users, and enabling task declarations directly on User classes. Later 2.x releases continued that modernization while preserving the package's code-first model.

How it is used

A normal Locust project defines user behavior in a Python locustfile, then runs `locust` to open the web UI or uses headless command-line options in CI. The configuration docs list CLI flags, environment variables, and config-file keys for the same settings.

Locust looks for `~/.locust.conf`, `./locust.conf`, and `./pyproject.toml` by default, with `--config` available for an additional file. No official credentials file is documented for the open source CLI.

Why package nerds care

Locust is important to package nerds because it is a Python CLI that is also a test framework, a web application, and a distributed worker system. Packaging has to account for Python versions, transitive networking dependencies, and executable entry points.

It is also culturally important as a counterpoint to GUI-first load-testing tools: install a package, commit a locustfile, and scale from a local smoke test to distributed load generation.

Timeline

• 2011: Locust was created by Carl Bystrom and Jonatan Heyman during Battlelog development.
• 2014: Locust 0.7-era changes updated major dependencies such as requests and gevent.
• 2020: Locust 1.0 introduced breaking API changes including `User` and `HttpUser` class names.
• 2021: Locust 2.0 refined distributed user control and other APIs.
• 2024: Locust maintainers described the project as thirteen years old with more than 60 million downloads.

Related projects

• Apache JMeter and Tsung are explicitly named in Locust's official history as prior tools the authors had used.
• k6, Gatling, Artillery, wrk, Vegeta, and ApacheBench occupy adjacent load-testing niches with different languages and execution models.

Sources

• https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/changelog.html
• https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/configuration.html
• https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/history.html
• https://github.com/locustio/locust
• https://www.locust.cloud/blog/open-source-load-testing-with-locust/