@fakehost/fake-rest

A fake REST server that can run as a service or bundled within a browser, for testing and demoing.

This is not a production server.

Example use cases

• For deep testing against a remote service you have very little control over
• For creating a standalone demo application

Run your e2e tests against a controllable fake version of a remote REST service.

Ensure your fake is aligned with the remote using contract tests.

Can be run in any node environment e.g.

• Testing with Playwright, Webdriver, Jest, Vitest
• Testing react-native applications with react-native-testing-library

For these, as the test runner runs in a nodejs process, its just a case of starting a HttpRestService with your Router, and ensuring your application endpoint is configured to point to your fake's endpoint.

See also

See testing in Playwright for playwright setup.

See testing in cypress for cypress setup.

See bundling fakes in a web application for creating standlone demo apps, or for similar for storybook etc.

See running as a local service

Why not just mock?

Mocking is great, but tends to leave a lot of static test data around your tests. What happens if the test data no longer matches the remote service?

Why not hijack the code directly from my test environment?

I've seen many examples of test setups that do things like expose methods on the global window object that are then called from tests to control the internal behaviour.

This is fine up to a point, but a this is creating a whole new api specifically for tests, b there is no longer a contract between your test version and the real version. Its much cleaner to instead treat the network interface of your application as the interface to your test setup.

License

@fakehost/fake-rest is licensed under the MIT License.