RESTful Web Service Testing

Unit testing RESTful web services is rather complex.  Ideally, the services are tested in isolation before being packaged as a service.  However, sometimes people will want to test the "finished" or "integrated" web services technology stack because (I suppose) they don't trust their lower-level unit tests.

Or they don't have effective lower-level unit tests.

Before we look at testing a complete RESTful web service, we need to expose some underlying principles.

Principle #1.  Unit does not mean "class".  Unit means unit: a discrete unit of code.  Class, package, module, framework, application.  All are legitimate meanings of unit.  We want to use stable, easy-to-live with unit testing tools.  We don't want to invent something based on shell scripts running CURL and DIFF.

Principle #2.  The code under test cannot have any changes made to it for testing.  It has to be the real, unmodified production code.  This seems self-evident.  But.  It gets violated by folks who have badly-designed RESTful services.

This principle means that all the settings required for testability must be part of an external configuration.  No exceptions.  It also means that your service may need to be refactored so that the guts can be run from the command line outside Apache.

When your RESTful Web Service depends on third-party web service(s), there is an additional principle.

Principle #3.  You must have formal proxy classes for all RESTful services your app consumes.  These proxy classes are going to be really simple, since they must trivially map resource requests to proper HTTP processing.  In Python, it is delightfully simple to create a class where each method simply uses httplib (or http.client in Python 3.2) to make a GET, POST, PUT or DELETE request.  In Java you can do this, also, it's just not delightfully simple.

TestCase Overview

Testing a RESTful web service is a matter of starting an instance of the service, running a standard unit testing TestCase, and then shutting that instance down.  Generally this will involve setUpModule and tearDownModule (in Python parlance) or a @BeforeClass and @AfterClass (in Java parlance).

The class-level (or module-level) setup must start the application server being tested.  The server will start in some known initial condition.  This may involve building and populating known database, too.  This can be fairly complex.

When working with SQL, In-memory databases are essential for this.  SQLite (Python) or http://hsqldb.org (Java) can be life-savers because they're fast and flexible.

What's important is that the client access to the RESTful web service is entirely under control of a unit testing framework.

Mocking The Server

A small, special-purpose server must be built that mocks the full application server without the endless overheads of a full web server.

It can be simpler to mock a server rather than to try to reset the state of a running Apache server.  TestCases often execute a sequence of stateful requests assuming a known starting state.   Starting a fresh mock server is sometimes an easy way to set this known starting state.

Here's a Python script that will start a server.   It writes the PID to a file for the shutdown script.

import http.server
import os
from the_application import some_application_feature
class AppWrapper( http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler ):
    def do_GET( self ):
        # Parse the URL

        id= url.split("/")[-1]

        # Invoke the real application's method for GET on this URL.
        body= some_application_feature( id )
        # Respond appropriately
        self.send_response( 200, body )
    ... etc ...

# Database setup before starting the service.
# Filesystem setup before starting the service.
# Other web service proxy processes must be started, too.
with open("someservice.pid","w") as pid_file:
    print( os.getpid(), file=pid_file )
httpd = http.server.HTTPServer("localhost:8000", AppWrapper)
try:
    httpd.serve_forever()
finally:
    # Cleanup other web services.

Here's a shutdown script.

import os, signal
with open("someservice.pid") as pid_file:
    pid= int( pid_file.read() )
os.kill( pid, signal.CTRL_C_EVENT )

These two scripts will start and stop a mock server that wraps the underlying application.

When you're working in Java, it isn't so delightfully simple as Python  But it should be respectably simple.  And you have Jython Java integration so that this Python code can invoke a Java application without too much pain.

Plus,  you can always fall further back to a CGI-like unit testing capability where "body= some_application_feature( id )" becomes a subprocess.call(). Yes it's inefficient.  We're just testing.

This CGI-like access only works if the application is very well-behaved and can be configured to process one request at a time from a local file or from the command line.  This, in turn, may require building a test harness that uses the core application logic in a CGI-like context where STDIN is read and STDOUT is written.