Node.js Tests: Mocking HTTP Requests

Introduction

Writing tests for an application that relies on external services, say, a RESTful API, is challenging. More often than not, an external resource may require authentication, authorization or may have a rate limiting. Hitting an endpoint for a service hosted in a service like AWS as part of testing would also incur extra charges.

This quickly goes out of hand when you are running tests a couple of times a day as a team, as well as part of continuous integration. Nock, a HTTP mocking and expectations library for Node.js can be used to avoid this.

Objectives

By the end of this post, we will have achieved the following.

• Written a simple Node.js application that makes a HTTP request to an external endpoint.
• Write tests for the application
• Mock the requests in the test.

Setting Up the Project

To get started, create a simple Node.js application by creating an empty folder and running npm init.

mkdir nock-tests
cd nock-tests
npm init

Installing the Packages

Next, we will install the following packages for our application and testing environment.

• Axios - A Promise based HTTP client for the browser and node.js
• Mocha - A popular Node.js testing framework.
• Chai - A BDD / TDD assertion library for Node.js
• Nock - A HTTP mocking and expectations library for Node.js

npm install --save axios
npm install --save-dev mocha chai nock

Setting Up Tests

Our tests will live inside a test directory, Go ahead and create a test directory and create our first test.

mkdir test
touch test/index.test.js

Our first test should be pretty straightforward. Assert that true is, well, true.

const expect = require('chai').expect;

describe('First test', () => {
  it('Should assert true to be true', () => {
    expect(true).to.be.true;
  });
});

To run our test, we could run the mocha command from our node_modules but that can get annoying. We are instead going to add it as an npm script.

{
  "name": "nock-tests",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "node_modules/.bin/mocha"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "axios": "^0.16.2"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "chai": "^4.0.2",
    "mocha": "^3.4.2",
    "nock": "^9.0.13"
  }
}

At this point, running npm test on your command-line should give you the following result.

npm test

Output
> nock-tests@1.0.0 test /Users/username/projects/nock-tests
> mocha
  First test
    ✓ Should assert true to be true
  1 passing (15ms)

We obviously don’t have any tests making requests, or a useful request for that matter, but we will be changing that.

Creating A Node.js App To Test

Let’s go ahead and write a simple function that makes a HTTP request to the GitHub API to get a user by username. Go ahead and create an index.js file in the root and add the following code.

const axios = require('axios');

module.exports = {
  getUser(username) {
    return axios
      .get(`https://api.github.com/users/${username}`)
      .then(res => res.data)
      .catch(error => console.log(error));
  }
};

Testing: The Wrong Way

Our test will assert that the request made returns an object with specific details. Replace the truthy test we created earlier with the following test for our code.

const expect = require('chai').expect;

const getUser = require('../index').getUser;

describe('Get User tests', () => {
  it('Get a user by username', () => {
    return getUser('octocat')
      .then(response => {
        //expect an object back
        expect(typeof response).to.equal('object');

        //Test result of name, company and location for the response
        expect(response.name).to.equal('The Octocat')
        expect(response.company).to.equal('GitHub')
        expect(response.location).to.equal('San Francisco')
      });
  });
});

Let’s break down the test.

• We import the getUser method from /index.js.
• We then call the function and assert that we get an object back and that the user’s name, company and location match.

This should pass on running the test by actually making a request to the GitHub API.

Let’s fix this!

Testing: The Right Way

Nock works by overriding Node’s http.request function. Also, it overrides http.ClientRequest too to cover for modules that use it directly.

With Nock, you can specify the HTTP endpoint to mock as well as the response expected from the request in JSON format. The whole idea behind this is that we are not testing the GitHub API, we are testing our own application. For this reason, we make the assumption that the GitHub API’s response is predictable.

To mock the request, we will import nock into our test and add the request and expected response in the beforeEach method.

const expect = require('chai').expect;
const nock = require('nock');

const getUser = require('../index').getUser;
const response = require('./response');

describe('Get User tests', () => {
  beforeEach(() => {
    nock('https://api.github.com')
      .get('/users/octocat')
      .reply(200, response);
  });

  it('Get a user by username', () => {
    return getUser('octocat')
      .then(response => {
        //expect an object back
        expect(typeof response).to.equal('object');

        //Test result of name, company and location for the response
        expect(response.name).to.equal('The Octocat')
        expect(response.company).to.equal('GitHub')
        expect(response.location).to.equal('San Francisco')
      });
  });
});

The expected response is defined as an export in a separate file.

module.exports = { login: 'octocat',
  id: 583231,
  avatar_url: 'https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/583231?v=3',
  gravatar_id: '',
  url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat',
  html_url: 'https://github.com/octocat',
  followers_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers',
  following_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}',
  gists_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}',
  starred_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}',
  subscriptions_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions',
  organizations_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs',
  repos_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos',
  events_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}',
  received_events_url: 'https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events',
  type: 'User',
  site_admin: false,
  name: 'The Octocat',
  company: 'GitHub',
  blog: 'http://www.github.com/blog',
  location: 'San Francisco',
  email: null,
  hireable: null,
  bio: null,
  public_repos: 7,
  public_gists: 8,
  followers: 1840,
  following: 6,
  created_at: '2011-01-25T18:44:36Z',
  updated_at: '2017-07-06T21:26:58Z' };

To test that this is the actual response expected in the test, try editing one of the fields in the response object and run the test again. The tests should fail.

In my case, I will be changing the name value to Scotch. You should get the error below.

Conclusion

We have only scratched the surface on what you can do with nock. It has a very detailed documentation on how to use it and it is worth exploring. For instance, If you are writing tests that involve error handling, you could mock error responses with an error message.

nock('http://www.google.com')
   .get('/cat-poems')
   .replyWithError('something awful happened');

Happy testing!