OHHTTPStubs

OHHTTPStubs is a library designed to stub your network requests very easily. It can help you:

• test your apps with fake network data (stubbed from file) and simulate slow networks, to check your application behavior in bad network conditions
• write Unit Tests that use fake network data from your fixtures.

It works with NSURLConnection, new iOS7/OSX.9's NSURLSession, AFNetworking (both 1.x and 2.x), or any networking framework that use Cocoa's URL Loading System.

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Documentation & Usage Examples

OHHTTPStubs headers are fully documented using Appledoc-like / Headerdoc-like comments in the header files. You can also read the online documentation here

Unfortunately macro documentation does not appear in the documentation generated by appledoc, so don't hesitate to take a look into OHHTTPStubsResponse.h, OHHTTPStubsResponse+JSON.h and OHHTTPStubsResponse+HTTPMessage.h too.

Basic usage example

[OHHTTPStubs stubRequestsPassingTest:^BOOL(NSURLRequest *request) {
    return [request.URL.host isEqualToString:@"mywebservice.com"];
} withStubResponse:^OHHTTPStubsResponse*(NSURLRequest *request) {
    // Stub it with our "wsresponse.json" stub file
    NSString* fixture = OHPathForFileInBundle(@"wsresponse.json",nil);
    return [OHHTTPStubsResponse responseWithFileAtPath:fixture
              statusCode:200 headers:@{@"Content-Type":@"text/json"}];
}];

More examples

For a lot more examples, see the dedicated "Usage Examples" wiki page.

Help Topics

The wiki also contain some articles that can help you get started with (and troubleshoot if needed) OHHTTPStubs.

Compatibility

OHHTTPStubs is compatible with iOS 5.0+ and OSX 10.7+.

OHHTTPStubs also works with iOS7's and OSX 10.9's NSURLSession mechanism.

Special Considerations

Using OHHTTPStubs in your Unit Tests

OHHTTPStubs is ideal to write Unit Tests that normally would perform network requests. But if you use it in your Unit Tests, don't forget to:

• remove any stubs you installed after each test — to avoid those stubs to still be installed when executing the next Test Case — by calling [OHHTTPStubs removeAllStubs] in you tearDown method. see this wiki page for more info
• be sure to wait until the request has received its response before doing your assertions and letting the test case to finish (like for any asynchronous test). see this wiki page for more info

Automatic loading

In general, OHHTTPStubs is automatically enabled by default, both for:

• requests made using NSURLConnection or [NSURLSession sharedSession];
• requests made using a NSURLSession created using a [NSURLSessionConfiguration defaultSessionConfiguration] or [NSURLSessionConfiguration ephemeralSessionConfiguration] configuration (using [NSURLSession sessionWithConfiguration:…]-like methods).

If you need to disable (and re-enable) OHHTTPStubs globally or per session, you can use:

• [OHHTTPStubs setEnabled:] for NSURLConnection/[NSURLSession sharedSession]-based requests
• [OHHTTPStubs setEnabled:forSessionConfiguration:] for requests sent on a session created using [NSURLSession sessionWithConfiguration:...]. Note that you have to call this before creating the NSURLSession as the NSURLSessionConfiguration is deep-copied on the creation of the NSURLSession instance and cannot be modified afterwards.

In practice, there is no need to ever explicitly call setEnabled: or setEnabled:forSessionConfiguration: using YES, as this is the default.

Known limitations

• OHHTTPStubs can't work on background sessions (sessions created using [NSURLSessionConfiguration backgroundSessionConfiguration]) because background sessions don't allow the use of custom NSURLProtocols and are handled by the iOS Operating System itself.
• OHHTTPStubs don't simulate data upload. The NSURLProtocolClient @protocol does not provide a way to signal the delegate that data has been sent (only that some has been loaded), so any data in the HTTPBody or HTTPBodyStream of an NSURLRequest, or data provided to -[NSURLSession uploadTaskWithRequest:fromData:]; will be ignored, and more importantly, the -URLSession:task:didSendBodyData:totalBytesSent:totalBytesExpectedToSend: delegate method will never be called when you stub the request using OHHTTPStubs.

As far as I know, there's nothing we can do about those two limitations. Please let me know if you know a solution that would make that possible anyway.

Installing in your projects

The recommanded way to use OHHTTPStubs is via CocoaPods. Simply add pod 'OHHTTPStubs' to your Podfile then run pod install and you are ready to use it.

Note: OHHTTPStubs requires iOS5 minimum.

Warning: Be careful anyway to include OHHTTPStubs only in your test targets, or only use it in #if DEBUG portions, if you don't want your stubs to still be included in your release for the AppStore!

In case you don't want to use CocoaPods (but you should!!!), the OHHTTPStubs project is provided as a Xcode project that generates a static library, so simply add its xcodeproj to your workspace and link your app against the libOHHTTPStubs.a library. See here for detailed instructions.

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About OHHTTPStubs own Unit Tests

If you want to be able to run OHHTTPStubs' Unit Tests, be sure you cloned the AFNetworking submodule (by using the --recursive option when cloning your repo, or using git submodule init and git submodule update) as it is used by some of OHHTTPStubs unit tests.

This submodule is only useful for OHHTTPStubs' own Unit Tests, that are testing its usage with AFNetworking: you don't need the submodule to use OHHTTPStubs and OHHTTPStubs has no dependency on AFNetworking itself.

Every contribution to add more unit tests is welcome!

License and Credits

This project and library has been created by Olivier Halligon (@aligatr on Twitter) and is under the MIT License.

It has been inspired by this article from InfiniteLoop.dk. I would also like to thank to @kcharwood for its contribution, and everyone who contributed to this project on GitHub.

If you want to support the development of this library, feel free to . Thanks to all contributors so far!