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You use a "VCR" module to record the real request and response and then play it back in your unit test. Boom you get the power of an integration test with the s

by Spivak 2y ago

You use a "VCR" module to record the real request and response and then play it back in your unit test. Boom you get the power of an integration test with the speed and determinism of a unit test. Then you turn off the VCR in CI to catch if/when the upstream API changes on you and now it's a real integration test. The problem with write tests, not too many, mostly integration is that unit tests are too damn good at giving you instant feedback and a tight dev loop. So we turned integration tests into unit tests. Combined with SQLite :memory: for unit tests and Postgres for the final integration tests we don't have to mock anything. Source: Currently use this method at $dayjob with great success.

piva00 2y ago
My question was a rhetorical one, I do use request-replayers and other techniques (I've been through a bunch in the past 20+ years as they were developed). I was challenging the absolutism of "never use mocks", it's just another technique and can be applied easily in integration tests if the guidelines are well set in the team on how to not use them. Also, I do not do external calls in the CI/CD pipeline, it inevitably makes tests brittle and flaky.