discourse/docs/TESTING.md

Discourse Developer Testing Guide

Some notes about testing Discourse:

FakeWeb

We use the FakeWeb gem to fake external web requests. For example, check out the specs on specs/components/oneboxer.

This has several advantages to making real requests:

• We freeze the expected response from the remote server.
• We don't need a network connection to run the specs.
• It's faster.

So, if you need to define a spec that makes a web request, you'll have to record the real response to a fixture file, and tell FakeWeb to respond with it for the URI of your request.

Check out spec/components/oneboxer/amazon_onebox_spec.rb for an example on this.

Recording responses

To record the actual response from the remote server, you can use curl and save the response to a file. We use the -i option to include headers in the output

curl -i http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby > wikipedia.response

If you need to specify the User-Agent to send to the server, you can use -A:

curl -i -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3' http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby > wikipedia.response 

If the remote server is responding with a redirect, you'll need to fake both the original request and the one for the destination. Check out the wikipedia.response and wikipedia_redirected.response files in spec/fixtures/oneboxer for an example. You can also consider working directly with the final URL for simplicity.