I’m working on a CouchDB library for PHP, and so I needed to write some tests for it. CouchDB has an HTTP API so I’m basically making web requests and while I could certainly set up a test database and run full-on integration tests, there are a few limitations with that approach. Firstly: it means I’m testing the database as well, which isn’t what I want and brings extra dependencies that make the tests harder to run. Also: I want to be able to test error cases, rate limiting and so on, that would be difficult to recreate reliably.
With all this in mind, I decided to just mock the CouchDB API for the calls I expected to make to it. Guzzle makes this much easier than I expected and it means that I can test all kinds of edge cases without trying to make contrived sequences of operations. As a side effect, the tests will run a lot faster using mocks than if I were making actual API calls to a remote database! https://goo.gl/HVXJdV #DataIntegration #ML