mockserver

mockserver is a library that will help you mocking your APIs in a matter of seconds: you simply organize your mocked HTTP responses in a bunch of mock files and it will serve them like they were coming from a real API; in this way you can write your frontends without caring too much whether your backend is really ready or not.

Installation

Simply install this library through NPM:

npm install mockserver

Usage

First of all, define where your mocked backend is gonna run:

var http    =  require('http');
var mockserver  =  require('mockserver');

http.createServer(mockserver('path/to/your/mocks')).listen(9001);

This will run a simple HTTP webserver, handled by mockserver, on port 9001.

At this point you can simply define your first mock: create a file in path/to/your/mocks called example-response_GET:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
   "Random": "content"
}

If you open your browser at http://localhost:9001/example-response you will see something like this:

And it's over: now you can start writing your frontends without having to wait for your APIs to be ready, or without having to spend too much time mocking them, as mockserver lets you do it in seconds.

Mock files

As you probably understood, mock files' naming conventions are based on the response that they are going to serve:

$REQUEST-PATH_$HTTP-METHOD

For example, let's say that you wanna mock the response of a POST request to /users, you would simply need to create a file named users_POST.

The content of the mock files needs to be a valid HTTP response, for example:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

{
   "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.8",
   "Host": "headers.jsontest.com",
   "Accept-Charset": "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3",
   "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"
}

Check our own mocks as a reference.

Variations

Sometimes it's quite handy to be able to support different responses for the "same" request, for example when you want to test that your frontend behaves correctly when POSTing at /users and in the case that the server could return either a 200 or a 500 error.

These are called "variations", and you can easily implement them by sending the mockserver-Variation header in your request.

For example, if you issue a POST request to /users with mockserver-Variation: failure you can then define a mock called users_POST_failure and put the related content there.

Tests

Tests run on travis, but if you wanna run them locally you simply have to run mocha or its verbose cousin ./node_modules/mocha/bin/mocha (if you don't have mocha installed globally).