Improvement: Make WebMock ignore the last slash (/) in URLs

[KelseyDH]

A common mistake when testing API's is accidentally including a / in a url in one place, while omitting that / in another endpoint. Effectively the endpoint works, yet WebMock will say they are different.

E.g. writing www.example.com/foo in assert_requested when the actual API hits http://example.com/foo/. When POSTing to an endpoint with parameters, this imperceptible difference is easy to miss and can lead to many hours of frustration as developers parse the long comparison output between the two requests to figure out what they did wrong in their API call versus the test case.

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My suggestion is that WebMock treats URL's ending in / the same as urls without the last slash. For those wanting the old behaviour, the gem could add a flag to reenable it for the few oddball projects actually treating calls to http://example.com/foo/ and http://example.com/foo differently.

[fcheung]

Isn’t the flip side to this that you could have a passing test but code the fails in production because of extra or missing / that would be equally hard to spot?

[KelseyDH]

@fcheung That would happen if the server treats http://example.com/foo/ & http://example.com/foo differently. My sense with a majority of Rails apps is that this is not the case. Usually though -- you would have tested the actual code making the api call against the test server already, so the WebMock is just covering you from slowing your tests down with them. But with quirks like this, WebMock slows down implementing what already works for most.

If the fear of this tripping up people is a problem though, perhaps this option could be enabled as a configuration option set during initialization?

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All of this is a longwinded way of saying: how can we help programmers quickly spot the difference between two nearly identical HTTP requests that WebMock outputs? In cases of a missing / the search is maddening.

[bblimke]

My sense with a majority of Rails apps is that this is not the case

I agree though please take into account that often Rails apps are only clients of externals API's, non-Rails API's and WebMock is to verify the usage of these API's.

I'm not really sure how many API's treat trailing slash or lack of it as the same endpoint. I acknowledge bot your @KelseyDH and @fcheung points. Perhaps WebMock should suggest adding or removing the missing slash in case it spots that this is the only difference?