Downloading and Installing JMeter
Welcome to Learn JMeter Series! This series helps you to learn Apache JMeter in a much simpler way with the relevant examples and exercises. This article talks about downloading and installing Apache JMeter in Windows OS. Let’s get started.
Previous article Introduction to JMeter
Prerequisites
The only prerequisite to run JMeter is to have Java 8+. In my system, I have installed Java 15.
There is no need to configure JMETER_HOME environment variable in the OS. JMeter will automatically detect it.
To verify the Java installation:
- Launch command prompt
- Enter
java -version
Java Verification
Downloading JMeter
To download the JMeter:
- Navigate to https://jmeter.apache.org/
- Click on Download Releases
Downloading and Installing JMeter
- Select the closest mirror
- Click on either zip or tgz file under Binaries
Download JMeter
This will download the binaries in your downloads folder.
Tip: Install Java JDK, not just JRE.
SHA512 Validation
To verify the integrity of JMeter zip file, click on respective SHA512 link. This will give you the string e.g. `
f2a1b98fb79224a97d8038660c97e390b798e0ba57b698bea8ae44f4061b86f7841ecb4165fc657684e89c9a0f8ec984d8a40a32a2f079a56953ce522ad9067a *apache-jmeter-5.4.zip
Launch Powershell in Windows and enter the below command.
Get-FileHash .\apache-jmeter-5.4.zip -Algorithm SHA512 | Format-List
This will give you the output as shown below. Verify that the both the hash string must match before you scan and extract the zip file.
Installing JMeter
JMeter is not an exe file or installable. Instead you will use jmeter.bat or jmeter.sh to launch the user interface.
Before extracting the contents, create a folder in your main drive e.g. C:\JMeter. It will help you to maintain different versions of JMeter.
Move the zip/tgz file to C:\JMeter and extract the contents.
Tip: If you are using 7z to extract, it will extract the contents faster than the native Windows Extraction.
Upon extraction, you will see the below folders by default.
JMeter folder structure
-
bin– very critical folder which contains *.jar, *.sh, *.bat, *.properties and more. It will also have examples, report-template, and templates folders. Do not make any changes unless you know what you are doing. -
docs– contains all css, images, screenshots etc for the help -
extras– contains *.bsh,*.cmd,*.xsl, ant related extra files -
lib– contains all the required files for JMeter -
licenses– contains all the licenses information for the jars -
printable_docs– contains all the user manual
Apart from the above folders, you could also see backups and other folders based on the plugins you have installed.
LICENSE, NOTICE and README.md are the text files for your leisure time read.
You can launch JMeter in multiple ways. The recommended approach is to launch the jmeter.bat for Windows or jmeter.sh for Linux and macOS.
Go to bin folder and double click on jmeter.bat in Windows which will launch the command prompt and displays the below information.
Launching JMeter
After few seconds JMeter will get launched as shown below.
JMeter GUI
Apart from jmeter.bat there are other files which will help you to launch JMeter either in GUI mode or CLI (Command Line Interface) mode.
If you want to launch JMeter without shell console, you can do that by launching jmeterw.cmd.
