smoke-testing

name	Smoke Testing
description	Health endpoint and critical path smoke testing patterns. Use when running quick validation tests, checking health endpoints, verifying critical paths respond correctly, or when user mentions smoke testing, health checks, quick validation, sanity checks.

Smoke Testing

CRITICAL: The description field above controls when Claude auto-loads this skill.

Overview

Provides scripts, templates, and patterns for smoke testing - quick validation that critical endpoints and pages are responding correctly before running full test suites.

Instructions

1. What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke tests are the fastest, most basic tests that verify:

• The application starts and responds
• Health check endpoints return 200
• Critical user-facing pages load without errors
• Key API endpoints are reachable

They run before unit/integration/E2E tests to catch deployment failures early.

2. Running Smoke Tests

Full smoke test orchestrator:

bash scripts/run-smoke-tests.sh [base-url] [project-path]

Individual checks:

bash scripts/check-health-endpoint.sh [health-url]
bash scripts/verify-critical-paths.sh [base-url] [paths-file]

3. Configuration

Smoke test configuration lives in .claude/project.json:

{
  "testing": {
    "smoke": {
      "health_endpoint": "/api/health",
      "critical_paths": ["/", "/login", "/dashboard"],
      "base_url": "http://localhost:3000",
      "timeout_seconds": 10
    }
  }
}

Or use a standalone config file:

// smoke-test-config.json
{
  "base_url": "http://localhost:3000",
  "health_endpoint": "/api/health",
  "timeout_seconds": 10,
  "critical_paths": [
    { "path": "/", "expected_status": 200 },
    { "path": "/login", "expected_status": 200 },
    { "path": "/api/health", "expected_status": 200, "expected_body": "ok" }
  ]
}

4. Health Check Endpoint Patterns

Next.js App Router:

// src/app/api/health/route.ts
export async function GET() {
  return Response.json({ status: 'ok', timestamp: new Date().toISOString() })
}

Express:

app.get('/health', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ status: 'ok' })
})

FastAPI:

@app.get("/health")
async def health():
    return {"status": "ok"}

Go:

http.HandleFunc("/health", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
    json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(map[string]string{"status": "ok"})
})

5. CI/CD Integration

Smoke tests should run:

• After deployment to verify the deploy succeeded
• Before E2E tests as a gating check
• On every PR as a quick validation

Available Scripts

1. run-smoke-tests.sh - Orchestrator that runs all smoke checks
2. check-health-endpoint.sh - Hit a health endpoint and verify response
3. verify-critical-paths.sh - Verify critical pages respond with 200

Available Templates

1. smoke-test-config.json - Configuration file template
2. health-check-test.sh - Reusable health check function

Available Examples

1. basic-smoke-test.md - Simple health check smoke test
2. critical-path-smoke.md - Testing critical user paths
3. ci-smoke-integration.md - Adding smoke tests to CI pipeline

Requirements

• curl for HTTP requests
• jq for JSON parsing (optional)
• Running application server (or ability to start one)