alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Tusk Drift – Turn production traffic into API tests
Hi HN! In the past few months my team and I have been working on Tusk Drift, a system that records real API traffic from your service, then replays those requests as deterministic tests. Outbound I/O (databases, HTTP calls, etc.) gets automatically mocked using the recorded data.
Problem we're trying to solve: Writing API tests is tedious, and hand-written mocks drift from reality. We wanted tests that stay realistic because they come from real traffic.
versus mocking libraries: Tools like VCR/Nock intercept HTTP within your tests. Tusk Drift records full request/response traces externally (HTTP, DB, Redis, etc.) and replays them against your running service, no test code or fixtures to write/maintain.
How it works:
1. Add a lightweight SDK (we currently support Python and Node.js)
2. Record traffic in any environment.
3. Run `tusk run`, the CLI sandboxes your service and serves mocks via Unix socket
We run this in CI on every PR. Also been using it as a test harness for AI coding agents, they can make changes, run `tusk run`, and get immediate feedback without needing live dependencies.
Source: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/tusk-drift-cli
Demo: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/drift-node-demo
Happy to answer questions!
Comments
Building something adjacent to this field :https://voiden.md/.
Also,I loved the approach here!
Can this be used for performance testing as well or just functional testing?
This is a smart approach to API testing - capturing real production patterns is way more valuable than synthetic tests.
One question: how do you handle sensitive data in the captured traces? We've been working on API governance at toran.sh and found that policy enforcement during trace capture can be tricky - especially ensuring PII doesn't leak into test fixtures.
Great work on the trace replay mechanism!
I'm sold on this. Have been looking for something similar!