4 ms·

Hamms: a misbehaving HTTP server for testing your clients

66 points by nreece 12y ago

chrismorgan 12y ago
A thing along these lines that I have come across before is http://pathod.net/ http://pathod.net/. How do they compare?
- kevinburke 12y ago
  In terms of functionality they are basically the same :) pathod has one server that behaves differently depending on the request you send. Hamms has different servers listening on different ports. I thought the interface was a little nicer that way. (I'm the author of hamms). I tried to add some things as well that make testing easier when I am writing a client. Testing retry logic is hard for example because the client is making the same request a bunch of times in a row so you have to either mock the client request or make the server return different things based on the same request. I added a server that errors twice and then returns a 200, to make that easier to test.
  - kirushik 12y ago
    Having ability to forward requests to an actual API of my service seems to be nice-to-have feature. (Especially for 5512 and 5513 ports, where actual correct 200 OK responses are expected.) Any plans on that?
    - kevinburke 12y ago
      Not at the moment... could use runscope.com or set up nginx as a proxy maybe ?
adwf 12y ago
Having written a web crawler recently, it's surprising just how many misbehaving servers are actually out there. Without proper error handling, a wide randomly seeded crawl would hit some form of malformed response or bizarre header within 15 minutes at the most. I eventually gave up on trying to parse all the myriad odd behaviours and now just dump them all onto a blacklist and move the crawler on.
shdon 12y ago
This really is a cool one. The different ports makes it very suitable for handling a specific kind of problem. It might also be nice if there was a port that responded with a random selection from the errors (or with a proper response). e.g. "Port 5599: All of the above, at random"
- kevinburke 12y ago
  Yeah this is a good idea. I think I'm gonna change the default behavior for that port
Ono-Sendai 12y ago
On this note, does anyone know about a 'misbehaving' HTTP client for testing servers?
- michaelmior 12y ago
  From another comment http://pathod.net/docs/pathoc http://pathod.net/docs/pathoc
blatherard 12y ago
A friend of mine wrote bane, which does similar stuff in Ruby: https://github.com/danielwellman/bane/ https://github.com/danielwellman/bane/

66 points by nreece 12y ago

chrismorgan 12y ago

A thing along these lines that I have come across before is http://pathod.net/ http://pathod.net/. How do they compare?

kevinburke 12y ago
In terms of functionality they are basically the same :) pathod has one server that behaves differently depending on the request you send. Hamms has different servers listening on different ports. I thought the interface was a little nicer that way. (I'm the author of hamms). I tried to add some things as well that make testing easier when I am writing a client. Testing retry logic is hard for example because the client is making the same request a bunch of times in a row so you have to either mock the client request or make the server return different things based on the same request. I added a server that errors twice and then returns a 200, to make that easier to test.
- kirushik 12y ago
  Having ability to forward requests to an actual API of my service seems to be nice-to-have feature. (Especially for 5512 and 5513 ports, where actual correct 200 OK responses are expected.) Any plans on that?
  - kevinburke 12y ago
    Not at the moment... could use runscope.com or set up nginx as a proxy maybe ?

adwf 12y ago

Having written a web crawler recently, it's surprising just how many misbehaving servers are actually out there. Without proper error handling, a wide randomly seeded crawl would hit some form of malformed response or bizarre header within 15 minutes at the most. I eventually gave up on trying to parse all the myriad odd behaviours and now just dump them all onto a blacklist and move the crawler on.

shdon 12y ago

This really is a cool one. The different ports makes it very suitable for handling a specific kind of problem. It might also be nice if there was a port that responded with a random selection from the errors (or with a proper response). e.g. "Port 5599: All of the above, at random"

kevinburke 12y ago
Yeah this is a good idea. I think I'm gonna change the default behavior for that port

Ono-Sendai 12y ago

On this note, does anyone know about a 'misbehaving' HTTP client for testing servers?

michaelmior 12y ago
From another comment http://pathod.net/docs/pathoc http://pathod.net/docs/pathoc

blatherard 12y ago

A friend of mine wrote bane, which does similar stuff in Ruby: https://github.com/danielwellman/bane/ https://github.com/danielwellman/bane/