jtietema/httpmock

An HTTP server useful for stubbing out external dependencies in functional tests

httpmock - Stubbing out third party web services

httpmock is a library for stubbing out web services without changing the system under test. It's designed for functional testing, where you want to test your code full-stack, but you don't want your tests to fail because of instability in services being developed by other teams. It can also be used when adding tests to a codebase that wasn't factored well for unit testing.

Prerequisites

httpmock is composed of two parts: a server that sits in for the third party web service, and client bindings. The server is written using node.js. The client bindings are written in whatever language you are using (Java is the only supported one at the moment).

Node.js is the only dependency to get the server up and running. Node.js will work on any unix-like platform (including cygwin). The easiest way to install it is probably you're package manager (e.g. brew install node). nvm allows you to install multiple versions of node and quickly switch versions. httpmock has been tested on v0.4.2 and v0.4.7.

Installation and Setup

From git

Clone the repository. make start will run the server on port 3000. make will build everything, and put all artifacts under build/package, including the JAVA library.

From source

Download the httpmock server and untar it where you want to. cd into that directory, and run bin/httpmock start.

That will run the control server (see below) on port 3000. You can optionally pass a --port argument command line argument to change the port and a --pidfile argument to use a non-default pidfile (useful if you're running multiple instances). If you run the server in a background job, bin/httpmock stop will kill it.

The client bindings will simply be a library. For Java, add httpmock.jar to your classpath.

From npm

Install with npm install -g httpmock. Then run the httpmock command as described above. See above to download the client bindings separately.

API

The Java API is a work in progress. For examples, look under clients/java/functional-test/org/httpmock/WasCalledAtFunctionalTest.java to see example verifications and clients/java/functional-test/org/httpmock/StubbingFunctionalTest.java for stubbing examples.

Adding protocols

httpmock supports stubbing and recording HTTP out of the box. Additional protocols can be supported by adding a directory under the lib/protocols directory of the server. httpmock will load the index.js file in that directory, which should export a load function that takes no arguments and returns an object with a create method that creates on object with the following properties:

• close: shut the server down
• loadRequests(path): loads all requests made to the server
• addStub(request): if defined, adds a stub to the server. If not defined, stubbing is assumed not to work for this protocol
• (future: need HTML rel pages to document API)

Building

To build everything, run make from a bash-like shell. The server can be tested with the make test. The Java code can be build and tested with make java. Alternatively, within the clients/java directory, you can run ant.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome (see TODO for my own open loops, although I welcome other ideas). You can reach me at [email protected].