What is the HttpResponseSimulator? Apart from being the least original name. Well, it is a tool that allows simulating the behaviour you want from an endpoint to test an HTTP client and/or wrapper. I built it over an afternoon so that I could write a timeout test for an
Like every small projects written with a simplistic goal the first version was not great. If you follow that link you will notice a lot of coupling and no tests whatsoever. The first couple of commits are still good enough to deploy and serve the HttpResponseSimulator original purpose. However, I wanted to push it further and live up to my whole being “future-proof” thing and make it robust. To make it robust I need it to be testable and cover as much logic as possible. This is where I started googling to figure how I to write tests and get coverage feedback with Node.js.
Due to the high coupling of my code my only option was to write http assertions related tests. The kind of tests where I hit the endpoints directly and validate the output based on the given input. In order to write these tests, I had two options that would later allow me to refactor that code to clean it up. The easy option was to follow my own tutorial on Postman and remain in a known territory.
However, I chose to try something new and stumbled into supertest that can implemented in tests that can be ran using Mocha. It seemed like the best option since I can write all my other tests post-decoupling using that Mocha too. Also, Mocha can be used along tools like Istanbul to generate coverage metrics that can be uploaded to coveralls. In that case, my choices were all driven by what I wanted to achieve which is very important in software development. Eventually after a few days of test writing and refactoring, I was finally happy with myself you can see the test coverage result below:
Now that it is robust, I feel like it is time to share it with the world. It is time to make it open-source, it may just die out in a few months or grow and become something bigger. It currently serves a few more purposes than just waiting a few seconds before responding. You can now get your response from any freely available url or pastebin id among other things. If you have any improvement suggestions feel free to hit me up through Github. Actually while you’re at it, if you have any coding notion and want to try your hand at open-source development you can fork the project and open pull requests to improve it. Also, if you have a better name than HttpResponseSimulator you can google around to hit me up.
