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HTTP testing in R

18 Mocking HTTP Requests

The very very short version is: webmockr helps you stub HTTP requests so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

18.1 Package documentation

Check out https://docs.ropensci.org/webmockr/ for documentation on webmockr functions.

18.2 Features

  • Stubbing HTTP requests at low http client lib level
  • Setting and verifying expectations on HTTP requests
  • Matching requests based on method, URI, headers and body
  • Support for testthat via vcr
  • Can be used for testing or outside of a testing context

18.3 How webmockr works in detail

You tell webmockr what HTTP request you want to match against and if it sees a request matching your criteria it doesn’t actually do the HTTP request. Instead, it gives back the same object you would have gotten back with a real request, but only with the bits it knows about. For example, we can’t give back the actual data you’d get from a real HTTP request as the request wasn’t performed.

In addition, if you set an expectation of what webmockr should return, we return that. For example, if you expect a request to return a 418 error (I’m a Teapot), then that’s what you’ll get.

What you can match against

  • HTTP method (required)

Plus any single or combination of the following:

  • URI
    • Right now, we can match directly against URI’s, and with regex URI patterns. Eventually, we will support RFC 6570 URI templates.
    • We normalize URI paths so that URL encoded things match URL un-encoded things (e.g. hello world to hello%20world)
  • Query parameters
    • We normalize query parameter values so that URL encoded things match URL un-encoded things (e.g. message = hello world to message = hello%20world)
  • Request headers
    • We normalize headers and treat all forms of same headers as equal. For example, the following two sets of headers are equal:
      • list(H1 = "value1", content_length = 123, X_CuStOm_hEAder = "foo")
      • list(h1 = "value1", "Content-Length" = 123, "x-cuSTOM-HeAder" = "foo")
  • Request body

Real HTTP requests

There’s a few scenarios to think about when using webmockr:

After doing

webmockr is loaded but not turned on. At this point webmockr doesn’t change anything.

Once you turn on webmockr like

webmockr::enable()

webmockr will now by default not allow real HTTP requests from the http libraries that adapters are loaded for (crul and httr).

You can optionally allow real requests via webmockr_allow_net_connect(), and disallow real requests via webmockr_disable_net_connect(). You can check whether you are allowing real requests with webmockr_net_connect_allowed().

Certain kinds of real HTTP requests allowed: We don’t suppoprt this yet, but you can allow localhost HTTP requests with the allow_localhost parameter in the webmockr_configure() function.

Storing actual HTTP responses

webmockr doesn’t do that. Check out vcr

18.4 Basic usage 

library("webmockr")
# enable webmockr
webmockr::enable()

Stubbed request based on uri only and with the default response

stub_request("get", "https://httpbin.org/get")
#> <webmockr stub> 
#>   method: get
#>   uri: https://httpbin.org/get
#>   with: 
#>     query: 
#>     body: 
#>     request_headers: 
#>   to_return:
library("crul")
x <- HttpClient$new(url = "https://httpbin.org")
x$get('get')
#> <crul response> 
#>   url: https://httpbin.org/get
#>   request_headers: 
#>     User-Agent: libcurl/7.81.0 r-curl/5.2.0 crul/1.4.0
#>     Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
#>     Accept: application/json, text/xml, application/xml, */*
#>   response_headers: 
#>   status: 200