ridicule

hapi plugin providing mocks for restful and querystring based APIs

setup

The following options are available for configuration.

apiPrefix
A string or array of strings representing the base of the routes that should be mocked
Defaults to /api

mocksDir
Directory containing the mock files.
Defaults to __dirname + './mocks', where __dirname is this plugin

mocksAdminPath
A relative URL that the admin page for this plugin can be found.
Defaults to /admin/mocks

mocksAdminServerLabels
An array of labels used during hapi's plugin registration
Defaults to ['admin']

enabled
Wether or not the mocks are enabled.
Defaults to false

how it works

Inside of your mocksDir, create a ridicule.js file that exposes an array hapi routes in it's module.exports.

At the start of the server, all configured routes are registered with a random 40 character prefix. (e.g. the route /foo is mocked out at /(uuid)/foo)

When the mock server is enabled, all incoming requests are matched against the configured apiPrefix. When a match is found, the request is internally forwarded to the mock route handler.

You have the ability to bailout on mocking out the request in a handler (useful for when you are mocking out only a subset of a querystring based system, since hapi matches on paths only). Simply require rididcule in the file, and then call ridicule.bailout(req, res), where req and res are the request and response objects inside of the handler.

configuring your mocks

The most common way of mocking out requests is just to return the data of a json file within the reply() interface of your route handler.

    var data = require('./mockFile.json');
 
    var route = {
        method: '*',
        path: '/mockPath',
        config: {
            handler: function (request, reply) {
                return reply(data);
            }
        }
    };

However, you have the ability to add additional metadata to the response, such as custom headers and HTTP status codes. You just need to wrap up your existing json file inside of another object, setting the original to payload, and add a ridiculeSettings field.

so this request

{
    "foo": "bar"
}

becomes

{
    "ridiculeSettings": {
        "statusCode": 418,
        "headers": { "Content-Type": "x-stream" }
    }
    payload: {
        "foo": "bar"
    }
}

Worth noting that since this is added at the very end of the hapi's request flow, As a result, since payload has to be inlined in the mock file, and is therefore limited to only support string and JSON objects, and not streams or buffers.

enabling your mocks

There are three ways to enable/disable mocks.

1. The hapi configuration setting

   You can change the enabled opton in your setup to true. This enables it at start, but can changed in the future by..

2. Toggling the admin page button

   You can turn mocks on or off at any time by visting the path configured under mocksAdminPath. By default this is /admin/mocks. Note that this is registered behind a hapi label (configurable in your setup, but ['admin'] by default). This allows you to ship ridicule in your production site, and have the toggle switch exist on a port that isn't publicly accessible.

3. A cookie on the client

   If the cookie always_ridicule=true is set on the client, then the configured mocks will always be served (until it is deleted, of course). Conversely, always_ridicule=false will force the client to never be mocked out, regardless of the server's current settings.

querystrings

Since hapi matches routes only on paths (and not any querystring parameters), you need to be able to match more than one query against a path. For that, ridicule provides ridicule.validate method.

validation

ridicule.validate is a function that takes a request and reply pair, then a validation object, consisting a validator object, and a callback function.

The validator object is a plain object, where each key represents the key of the querystring, and the value is either a string, RegExp, or function that matches the value of the corresponding value in the querystring.

For example, the following querystring

?category=Music&genre=ska&year=2012

would match the following validation

...
  handler: function(request, reply) {
      ridicule.validate(request, reply, {
          validator: {
              category: 'Music',
              genre: function(value) {
                return value === 'ska' || value === 'rocksteady'
              },
              year: /^\d{4}$/
          },
          callback: function(request, reply) {
              reply({'all': 'good'});
          }
      })
  }
...

of course you can easily chain multiple checks

      var queriesToCheck = [{
        validator: {
            category: 'Music',
            genre:'ska',
            year: /^\d{4}$/
        },
        callback: function(request, reply) {
            reply().file('./authMock.json');
        }
      },{
        validator: {
            foo: 'bar',
            baz: 'biz'
        },
        callback: function(request, reply) {
            reply({'wordsAre': 'hard'});
        }
      }];
 
      queriesToCheck.some(function(route) {
        return ridicule.validate(request, reply, route);
      });

bailout

You may run into an issue where you want to mock out a subset of your requests at an endpoint, but not all of them. In this case, ridicule provides a handy helper function, ridicule.bailout.

all you need to do is add it to the end of your query checks, passing through the handlers request and reply interfaces.

      var matched = queriesToCheck.some(function(route) {
          return ridicule.validate(request, reply, route);
      });
 
      if (!matched) {
          ridicule.bailout(request, reply);
      }

An alternative to this is setting the validator object on your final query to true. This will automatically match the supplied query, and can act as a catchall

      var queriesToCheck = [{
        validator: {
            category: 'Music',
            genre:'ska',
            year: /^\d{4}$/
        },
        callback: function(request, reply) {
            reply().file('./authMock.json');
        }
      },{
        validator: true,
        callback: function(request, reply) {
            reply().file('./catchall.json');
        }
      }];
 
      queriesToCheck.some(function(route) {
        return ridicule.validate(request, reply, route);
      });