Setting host! in before (:each or :all) does not work in Request-specs

[steviee]

What Ruby, Rails and RSpec versions are you using?

Ruby version: 3.3.6
Rails version: 8.0.0
RSpec version: 3.13

• rspec-core 3.13.2
• rspec-expectations 3.13.3
• rspec-mocks 3.13.2
• rspec-rails 7.1.0
• rspec-support 3.13.1

Observed behaviour

I prepared this spec

require 'rails_helper'

# This spec is a basic test that verifies that the code is working.
RSpec.describe 'Basic API Tests' do
  describe 'GET /api/users/steviee/repos', type: :request do
    before :each do
      host! 'timeapi.io'
    end

    it 'returns successful response' do
      get "/api/time/current/zone?timeZone=Europe/Berlin"
      expect(response).to have_http_status(200)
      expect(response.body["timeZone"]).to eq('Europe/Berlin')
    end
  end
end

The above code is expected to run the request against the host timeapi.io, however it is run against 127.0.0.1 as per logs:

[c93d8682-67ca-4aad-9545-5705a736ee01] Started GET "/api/time/current/zone?timeZone=Europe/Berlin" for 127.0.0.1 at 2024-11-12 16:17:57 +0100
[c93d8682-67ca-4aad-9545-5705a736ee01]   
[c93d8682-67ca-4aad-9545-5705a736ee01] ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/api/time/current/zone"):
[c93d8682-67ca-4aad-9545-5705a736ee01]   
  TRANSACTION (0.0ms)  ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
F

Failures:

  1) Basic API Tests GET /api/users/steviee/repos returns successful response
     Failure/Error: expect(response).to have_http_status(200)
       expected the response to have status code 200 but it was 404
     # ./spec/accounts/basic_api_spec.rb:11:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.22201 seconds (files took 0.5135 seconds to load)
1 example, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/accounts/basic_api_spec.rb:9 # Basic API Tests GET /api/users/steviee/repos returns successful response

Expected behaviour

The expected behavior would be calling another host as per host!-setting.

Can you provide an example reproduction?

See above.

Created a new fress api-only Rails 8.0.0 app, added RSpec and the spec from above.
No further configuration on RSpec was done.

[JonRowe]

To clarify, what are you expecting to work here which isn't, the host! functionality is part of the Rails test helpers which sets the header HTTP_HOST for a test request that makes Rails act as if that domain name was used, but it doesn't affect the IP address any server is listening on, or a request is made from...

[steviee]

Ah, I see! So whatever I do, it won't call a remote endpoint, except if I use rest-client or some other library explicitly, correct?

Kind regards and thank you for the clarification! I missed that point explicitly mentioned and was expecting a different behavior.

[JonRowe]

Indeed, there is no built in functionality for testing remote systems.