How to install wrk on ubuntu system?

Feb 5, 2025

1. Purpose

In this post, I will demonstrate how to install wrk, a web URL performance test tool, on Linux/Unix/Mac systems.

2. The Solution

2.1 What is wrk?

wrk is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.

2.2 How to install wrk?

On Ubuntu systems, you should update the local cache first:

root@launch-advisor-20191120:/etc/nginx# apt update
....

root@launch-advisor-20191120:/etc/nginx# apt install wrk
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package wrk

wrk can only run on Unix-like systems. Such as linux, mac, solaris, etc. It can only be compiled on these systems.

So we can install it from source:

download wrk source code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev git -y
git clone https://github.com/wg/wrk.git wrk

Then build it:

cd wrk
sudo make

Then we can use the binary:

# move the wrk executable to your PATH
sudo cp wrk /usr/local/bin

2.3 Verify the installation of wrk

root@launch-advisor-20191120:~/wrk# wrk
Usage: wrk <options> <url>
  Options:
    -c, --connections <N>  Connections to keep open
    -d, --duration    <T>  Duration of test
    -t, --threads     <N>  Number of threads to use

    -s, --script      <S>  Load Lua script file
    -H, --header      <H>  Add header to request
        --latency          Print latency statistics
        --timeout     <T>  Socket/request timeout
    -v, --version          Print version details

  Numeric arguments may include a SI unit (1k, 1M, 1G)
  Time arguments may include a time unit (2s, 2m, 2h)
root@launch-advisor-20191120:~/wrk#

3. Summary

In this post, I demonstrated how to install wrk , a great performance test tool on ubuntu systems. That’s it, thanks for your reading.