dclucas/ruffian

A fake server for easy testing

Ruffian

What

Ruffian is a hapi-based server that allows developers to easily set up fake servers for isolated testing.

Why

There are, of course, alternatives to isolating your tests from external components:

• you can isolate the modules in your code that interact with external services and mock them (using sinon, for example);

• you can use a library that mocks the http library itself (such as nock);

These approaches have their cases for best usage and the purpose here is not to prove that setting up a fake server is a better approach. But there are situations in which this leads you to a better test structure.

If you are leveraging practices such as:

1. using contract-driven tests to check your external dependencies;
2. using a service composition tool such as docker-compose to set up your target environment;

then ruffian may be the tool for you. Use the contracts from item #1 to set up your request/response expectations, bring a ruffian app within a container so that you can manually exercise your code, in case you choose to.

How: installation

You can install ruffian as a global tool:

npm install -g ruffian

And then start it through the cli:

ruffian

You can also clone this repo and start the server by doing:

npm install
npm start

How: setting up fakes through the CLI

You can pass a JSON file to the CLI:

ruffian -f fakes.json

Ruffian expects the file to contain an array of objects, each with the following attributes:

• method: the HTTP verb to respond to. Possible values: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, HEAD, OPTIONS
• path: route from ruffians root "/". All routes must start with a backslash. Ruffian accepts any format supported by hapi
• payload: the payload Ruffian should return when the endpoint is exercised

How: setting up fakes through the REST interface

Once the server is running, you can configure behavior by posting data to the ruffian/fakes endpoint:

curl -X POST -H "Cache-Control: no-cache" -H "Postman-Token: ea3a34e1-ee5b-53a6-59e5-caf6fe5bc400" -d '{
	"method": "GET",
	"path": "/foo",
	"payload": "bar!"
}' "http://localhost:3000/ruffian/fakes"

How: setting up fakes through the module

TO-DO: finish lib handling and document how-to

ruffian's Issues

Rename README file

Hello, you could rename README file to README.md so github would hander it as HTML. At least I think so.