Fakerest

Fakerest is a simple tool based on sinatra which starts a http server (webrick) and exposes restful services based on the configuration specified in a YAML format.

You can :

• Stub any of the restful servies be it any method GET, POST, HEAD, PUT etc.
• Configure multiple URLs based on your need
• Define the response code for each of the URL
• Define the response content type for each of the URL
• Define the response content based on erb templates for each of the URL
• Look at the requests made by your application for verifying what the application request look like. Quite handly for testing.
• Upload files and view the files uploaded in your stub.

Ruby version 1.9.3

These are required libraries to build and install fakerest:

• sinatra - webrick based library to host rest services
• rake - build tool for ruby (required only if you are building from code)
• mocha - mocha is a mocking and stubbing library for Ruby (this is required only for running tests)

gem install fakerest

Follow these simple steps to create a gem and install it

git clone git://github.com/katta/fakerest.git
cd fakerest
bundle install
rake package
gem install pkg/fakerest-<version>.gem

Once you install this gem it creates an executable fakerest in the gems default executable directory. To find the gems executable directory use the command gem environment and look out for EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY:

For easy access update your PATH environment variable to point to a EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY:

You can run fakerest using a command

$ fakerest

this will display the instructions on all the command line arguments to use fakerest which looks like

Usage: fakerest.rb [options]
 -c, --config CONFIG_FILE         Confilg file to load request mappings (required)
 -p, --port PORT                  Port on which the fakerest to be run. Default = 1111
 -o, --bind HOSTNAME/IP_ADDR      String specifying the hostname or IP address of the interface to listen on . Default = localhost
 -w, --views VIEWS_FOLDER         Folder path that contains the views. Default = <WORKING_DIR>/views
 -u, --uploads UPLOADS_FOLDER     Folder to which any file uploads to be stored. Default = <WORKING_DIR>/uploads
 -h, --help                       Displays help message

$ fakerest -c sample.yaml

sample.yaml is a config file which contains the configuration of all rest services you would like to host. It looks like

---
method : get
path : /customer/:id
response:
  content_file : customer
  content_type : json
  status_code : 200
---
method : post
path : /customer
response:
  content_file : customer_created
  content_type : text/plain
  status_code : 200

Use -p option to change the port on which the fakerest runs. By default it runs on 1111 port.

$ fakerest -p 2222 -c sample.yaml

Views are the erb template files from which the content is read and is served as a response to a http request based on the view file specified in the configuration.

For e.g. In the following configuration, notice the value for content_file. Fakerest looks for a template customer.erb in the views folder.

method : get
path : /customer/:id
response:
  content_file : customer # view file
  content_type : json 
  status_code : 200

Option -w can be used to tell Fakerest the folder in which the view files are held. A samile view file will look like this

{
  "id" : "<%= params["id"] %>",
  "name" : "John"
}

Notice the expression <%= params["id"] %> in the above template code, this will get evaluated before the response is served to the client by Fakerest using the parameters passed in the request.

In the above case if a request is made to a url http://localhost:1111/customer/20 the response will be

{
  "id" : "20",
  "name" : "John"
}

You can do a post with file attachments to fakerest server and verify the content of the file using the browser (see next section)

There is a known issue with this, the file attachment parameter name should be "file"

Just go to your favorite browser and hit http://localhost:1111/requests/10 where 10 is a number of recent requests you would like to verify. You could change that number 10 to number of requests you are interested in.

• 0.0.6 - option to bind to a given IP Address
• 0.0.4 - minor bug fixes
• 0.0.3 - with fix for file uploads
• 0.0.2 - initial version (with known issue of file uploads not working)