/api-facilitation

Primary LanguageCSS

Credit to Juice’s consuming/test APIs with Rails: https://github.com/justinhuynh/api_clinic

Consuming APIs

Many many ways to make HTTP requests to an API, outside of our application we can get the same data by doing:

$ curl https://api.github.com/users/jennceng

We can make a get request by simply going to the url in the browser

https://api.github.com/users/jennceng

To mimic how our application is going to assemble our HTTP get request, we can also:

pry
require 'HTTParty'
HTTParty.get("https://api.github.com/users/jennceng")

What is HTTParty doing for us?

Basically, we are just visiting a website using Ruby, and then doing stuff with the output. To access a website in Ruby, we need to use an HTTP client.

HTTP clients allow us to GET (and POST or otherwise interact with) info from external websites. There are a number of HTTP clients out there that wrap Ruby's native Net:HTTP library.

VCR

Real HTTP Request to Fake HTTP Service

VCR is a gem that intercepts any outgoing HTTP requests from our app (in test) and returns a fake HTTP response that is stored in a YAML file (cassette).

  1. Add VCR and webmock to your Gemfile

  2. Create a file spec/support/vcr.rb and add the following configuration info:

require "vcr"

VCR.configure do |c|
c.cassette_library_dir = "spec/vcr_cassettes"
c.hook_into :webmock
c.ignore_localhost = true
c.configure_rspec_metadata!
c.default_cassette_options = { record: :new_episodes }
c.allow_http_connections_when_no_cassette = false
end

record: :new_episodes makes a real HTTP request the first time, and saves it into a .yml file ("cassette"), with a name that you specify (see test example below).

  1. Now you are ready to add VCR to specific tests. Let's see an example in the spec folder:

All you need to do is add vcr: { cassette_name: "file_name_here" } after the quote in your describe statement. This is a hash, and the vcr: statement signifies that you want to use VCR for the enclosed tests.