FakeWeb¶ ↑

FakeWeb is a helper for faking web requests in Ruby. It works at a global level, without modifying code or writing extensive stubs.

• You can install the latest release from RubyGems:

  gem install fakeweb
  

  Note that the gem was previously registered as FakeWeb, switching to fakeweb in 2009. All releases are available under the new name.

• If your application uses Bundler, add a line like this to your Gemfile:

  gem "fakeweb", "~> 1.3"
  

  You may want to specify :group => :test and/or :require => false, depending on how you use Bundler.

• If you’re developing a gem, add a line like this to your gemspec:

  spec.add_development_dependency "fakeweb", ["~> 1.3"]
  

RDocs for the current release are available at fakeweb.rubyforge.org.

There’s a mailing list for questions and discussion at groups.google.com/d/forum/fakeweb-users.

The main source repository is github.com/chrisk/fakeweb.

<img src=“https://travis-ci.org/chrisk/fakeweb.png?branch=master” alt=“Build Status” style=“vertical-align: text-top” /> FakeWeb’s tests run at travis-ci.org/chrisk/fakeweb.

Start by requiring FakeWeb:

require 'fakeweb'

FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://example.com/test1", :body => "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

You can also call register_uri with a regular expression, to match more than one URI.

FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, %r|http://example\.com/|, :body => "Hello World!")

Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/test3"))
=> "Hello World!"

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/", :body => "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", :body => "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-style 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 now deprecated.)

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",
                     [{:body => "Post 1 deleted.", :status => ["200", "OK"]},
                      {:body => "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 fake requests that use basic authentication by adding userinfo strings to your URIs:

FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://example.com/secret", :body => "Unauthorized", :status => ["401", "Unauthorized"])
FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://user:pass@example.com/secret", :body => "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

It’s recommended that you set FakeWeb.allow_net_connect = false in the setup for your tests.

If you want to prevent your tests from hitting the internet while allowing access to a specific server for integration testing, you can assign a URI or Regexp to be used as a whitelist for outbound requests:

FakeWeb.allow_net_connect = %r[^https?://localhost]
Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://localhost/path"))  # => allowed
Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com/"))    # => raises FakeWeb::NetConnectNotAllowedError

When you register a response using the :body option, you’re only setting the body of the response. If you want to add headers to these responses, simply add the header as an option to register_uri:

FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, "http://example.com/hello.txt", :body => "Hello", :content_type => "text/plain")

This sets the “Content-Type” header in the response.

It’s often useful to retrieve the last request made by your code, so you can write tests for its content. FakeWeb keeps track of the last request, whether it was stubbed or not:

Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://example.com"))
FakeWeb.last_request  # => Net::HTTP::Get request object

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.

• 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/d/msg/fakeweb-users/RNGQprEuQnM/ryCiMeBD91YJ for a discussion of some different options. Thanks!