Question

I use cucumber for lots of things. I really like it as a BDD environment.

So I’d like to use it as an external tool to test an API. I’d like to do things like:

  Scenario: Hit api /info path and get info back
    When I visit the API path '/info'
    Then I should see the following text "Here's info on the API"

or something similar. I mainly want to treat the API as a black box and test only inputs and outputs. I don’t plan on inspecting anything inside the API.

Most of the libraries I’ve looked at that work with Cucumber (for example Capybara) seem to be designed around Rack-based applications. I’d like something similar to that but with no dependency on Rack.

What gems, if any, exist that have no rack dependencies. Or is there a way to use Capybara to test an API that’s on a remote server?

Answer 1

I wouldn’t use Capybara to test a remote API because Capybara is made for testing applications is used for testing applications with a HTML UI (as Aslak points out in the comments).

Instead, I would use Cucumber* in conjunction with something like HTTParty which would be the tool used to make the HTTP requests and parse them neatly. Here’s an idea:

When /^I visit the API path '(.*?)'/ do |path|
  @result = HTTParty.get("http://theapi.com/#{path}")
end

Then /^I should see the following result:$/ do |result|
  @result.should == result
end

The final step here you would use like this:

Then I should see the following result:
   """
     { success: true }
   """

* I would actually use RSpec personally, I find the syntax less clumsy.