HTTP testing in R: overview of tools and new features

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes sure that your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to make changes moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has broken existing functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a nice place to get started with testing.

One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests. This adds complexity for many reasons:

• Remote resources can change in a variety of ways, all leading to broken tests:
  • Response structure can change, potentially breaking downstream processing
  • Query parameter names can change, routes can be deprecated
  • Remote resources can be temporarily down
• If you’re testing a function in your package that does an HTTP request, you’re testing the code, but also the remote resource. This may be what you want, but perhaps its not.
• Some remote resources require authentication. Good software development uses continuous integration; testing in different computational environments means you have to think about whether you can run a test that requires authentication.
  • In R, we are in the unusual situation relative to other programming languages (e.g., Ruby, Python, Node) where the distribution channel for our packages (CRAN) also checks the packages; yet another context in which you have to think about whether you can run a test or not
• Test suite runs are slower when HTTP requests are made (and variable depending on server response times and internet speed)

To make testing easier for R packages that do HTTP requests we’ve been working on two packages: webmockr and vcr (introduced on this blog in February 2018 and May 2018, respectively). There’s been a lot of changes since those two blog posts, making testing R packages with HTTP requests easier than ever.

Mocking with webmockr

webmockr is a general purpose library for mocking HTTP requests, built to work with any HTTP client in R (exception: curl, for good reason). Use cases include:

• mocking requests in package test suites (i.e., it can be hard to re-create some scenarios, e.g., intermittent server errors, timeouts, etc.)
• you want to run code when you don’t have access to the internet – webmockr can help with that
• webmockr can allow you to run tests before the API you’ll use even exists

Let’s run through a simple example. First, load and enable webmockr:

library(webmockr)
webmockr::enable()

Then create a stub with stub_request(). Here, we stub a request based on HTTP method and URL only.

stub_request("get", "https://httpbin.org/get")

Now make a “request”. If the request matches the stub, a real HTTP request will NOT be made, but instead webmockr returns the same object you’ get with a real HTTP request, but with whatever you told webmockr to return (in this case nothing).

library("crul")
x <- HttpClient$new(url = "https://httpbin.org")
x$get('get')
#> <crul response> 
#>   url: https://httpbin.org/get
#>   request_headers: 
#>     User-Agent: libcurl/7.54.0 r-curl/4.3 crul/0.9.0
#>     Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
#>     Accept: application/json, text/xml, application/xml, */*
#>   response_headers: 
#>   status: 200

What’s new in webmockr?

• If you were using webmockr with httr, you’re in luck. The latest version of webmockr (v0.5) fixed an issue where we weren’t mocking httr simple authentication.
• A big new feature in v0.5 is support for writing to disk. Both crul and httr allow users to write to disk as part of the HTTP request. HTTP clients in some other languages I’m familiar with (e.g., Ruby) don’t do this; you’d have to write to disk yourself. Anyway, the point is that supporting writing to disk (here and in vcr) was not super easy; it’s a complicated thing to support. There will probably be edge cases that will break; open an issue if you run into problems mocking HTTP requests that write to disk.

Check out the release notes for all webmockr changes

Record and replay requests with vcr

vcr leverages webmockr to handle matching requests, but instead of just mocking requests, vcr records real requests and plays them back (hence the name).

Let’s run through a simple example. First, load vcr:

library(vcr)
library(crul)

The main interface in vcr is vcr::use_cassette(). Pass a code block to use_cassette as the second argument and vcr will allow a real HTTP request the first time the block is run, and record the request and response to a file. Any subsequent running of the same code will use the cached data.

For example, here we make a request to https://httpbin.org

use_cassette(name = "helloworld", {
  req1 = crul::HttpClient$new(url = "https://httpbin.org")$get("get")
})

Which makes a real HTTP request and records the request and response to a file helloworld.yml. The second call to the same block

use_cassette(name = "helloworld", {
  req2 = crul::HttpClient$new(url = "https://httpbin.org")$get("get")
})

uses the helloworld.yml file – a real HTTP request is not done on subsequent calls.

And we can test that the returned response is the same in both code blocks above

testthat::compare(req1, req2)
#> Equal

What’s new in vcr?

• Just as webmockr now handles mocking writing to disk, vcr can now handle requests that write to disk. See ?mocking-disk-writing to get started.
• You can now easily turn off vcr completely, either through a function call or using an environment variable (e.g., ideal for those that work on the command line or use in continuous integration scenarios). See ?lightswitch to get started.
• Ignoring certain requests now works, only for crul for now. Ignoring means that the real HTTP request you want to ignore will be allowed, while all other requests will be handled by vcr. You can right now ignore certain hosts (e.g., google.com) and all localhost requests; in the future we hope to support ignoring any specific request via user defined functions. See the vcr configuration vignette for discussion and examples.

Open an issue if you run into problems with any of the above features.

Check out the release notes for all vcr changes

HTTP Testing Book

We’ve also been working on a book: HTTP mocking and testing in R. The book is intended as a detailed guide for HTTP mocking and testing in R code and packages. The book aims to introduce the reader to leveraging webmockr and vcr in their test suites, going into detail with both packages.

We’ve got some new content in the book and we have more planned. We’d love any feedback on the book; let us know by opening an issue.