FakeWeb is a helper for faking web requests in Ruby. It works at a global level, without modifying code or writing extensive stubs.
The latest release of FakeWeb is once again available from your friendly RubyForge mirror. Just install the gem:
sudo gem install fakeweb
Note: the gem was previously available as FakeWeb
(capital letters), but now all versions are simply registered as fakeweb
. If you have any old FakeWeb
gems lying around, remove them: sudo gem uninstall FakeWeb
RDocs for the current release are available at fakeweb.rubyforge.org.
There’s a mailing list for questions and discussion at groups.google.com/group/fakeweb-users.
The main source repository is github.com/chrisk/fakeweb.
Start by requiring FakeWeb:
require 'rubygems' require 'fakeweb'
FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://example.com/test1", :string => "Hello World!") Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/test1")) => "Hello World!" Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/test2")) => FakeWeb is bypassed and the response from a real request is returned
page = `curl -is http://www.google.com/` FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://www.google.com/", :response => page) Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://www.google.com/")) # => Full response, including headers
FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://example.com/", :string => "Nothing to be found 'round here", :status => ["404", "Not Found"]) Net::HTTP.start("example.com") do |req| response = req.get("/") response.code # => "404" response.message # => "Not Found" response.body # => "Nothing to be found 'round here" end
FakeWeb.register_uri(:any, "http://example.com", :string => "response for any HTTP method")
If you use the :any
symbol, the URI you specify will be completely stubbed out (regardless of the HTTP method of the request). This can be useful for RPC-like services, where the HTTP method isn’t significant. (Older versions of FakeWeb always behaved like this, and didn’t accept the first method
argument above; this syntax is still supported, for backwards-compatibility, but it will probably be deprecated at some point.)
You can optionally call FakeWeb.register_uri with an array of options hashes; these are used, in order, to respond to repeated requests. Once you run out of responses, further requests always receive the last response. (You can also send a response more than once before rotating, by specifying a :times
option for that response.)
FakeWeb.register_uri(:delete, "http://example.com/posts/1", [{:string => "Post 1 deleted.", :status => ["200", "OK"]}, {:string => "Post not found", :status => ["404", "Not Found"]}]) Net::HTTP.start("example.com") do |req| req.delete("/posts/1").body # => "Post 1 deleted" req.delete("/posts/1").body # => "Post not found" req.delete("/posts/1").body # => "Post not found" end
You can stub requests that use basic authentication with userinfo
strings in the URIs:
FakeWeb.register_uri("http://example.com/secret", :string => "Unauthorized", :status => ["401", "Unauthorized"]) FakeWeb.register_uri("http://user:pass@example.com/secret", :string => "Authorized") Net::HTTP.start("example.com") do |http| req = Net::HTTP::Get.new("/secret") http.request(req) # => "Unauthorized" req.basic_auth("user", "pass") http.request(req) # => "Authorized" end
The FakeWeb registry is a singleton that lasts for the duration of your program, maintaining every fake response you register. If needed, you can clean out the registry and remove all registered URIs:
FakeWeb.clean_registry
When you’re using FakeWeb to replace all of your requests, it’s useful to catch when requests are made for unregistered URIs (unlike the default behavior, which is to pass those requests through to Net::HTTP as usual).
FakeWeb.allow_net_connect = false Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/")) => raises FakeWeb::NetConnectNotAllowedError FakeWeb.allow_net_connect = true Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/")) => FakeWeb is bypassed and the response from a real request is returned
This is handy when you want to make sure your tests are self-contained, or you want to catch the scenario when a URI is changed in implementation code without a corresponding test change.
FakeWeb lets you decouple your test environment from live services without modifying code or writing extensive stubs.
In addition to the conceptual advantage of having idempotent request behaviour, FakeWeb makes tests run faster than if they were made to remote (or even local) web servers. It also makes it possible to run tests without a network connection or in situations where the server is behind a firewall or has host-based access controls.
FakeWeb works with anything based on Net::HTTP–both higher-level wrappers, like OpenURI, as well as a ton of libraries for popular web services.
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Request bodies are ignored, including PUT and POST parameters. If you need different responses for different request bodies, you need to request different URLs, and register different responses for each. (Query strings are fully supported, though.) We’re currently considering how the API should change to add support for request bodies in 1.3.0. Your input would be really helpful: see groups.google.com/group/fakeweb-users/browse_thread/thread/44d190a6b12e4273 for a discussion of some different options. Thanks!
Copyright 2006-2007 Blaine Cook
Copyright 2008-2009 various contributors
FakeWeb is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. FakeWeb is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with FakeWeb; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
See LICENSE.txt
for the full terms.