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Mock API?

8 pointsitshabib6 comments

I’m curious to hear what everyone uses or does whenever they are developing and need to interact with an API that hasn’t been created or whos actual contents doesn’t necessarily matter yet. Do you tend to hard code responses that an api can return? Do you mock the API another way?

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For early stage and hackathon-style API mocking, JSON Server is pretty cool. You implement a JSON file of objects that gets inferred as endpoints and served up as an API.

https://github.com/typicode/json-server

For a fancier solution, Swagger / OpenAPI spec is useful. It has a feature called API Auto Mocking which you can serve with SwaggerHub. [The free tier includes this feature by the way.]

https://app.swaggerhub.com/help/integrations/api-auto-mockin...

https://swagger.io/tools/swaggerhub/

You can also use Swagger Codegen to generate server stubs and API clients as code in various languages once you're ready to break out of the mock API.

https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen

That's the route I'd go personally as this tooling is available for free, is fairly mature, and has a strong community behind it at this point.

There are a few other similar alternatives that I know less about such as WireMock (http://wiremock.org/) and Stoplight (https://stoplight.io/). Postman also has a mock server feature if you happen to already use that.

Flask app with programmatically generated mock data with variations. nginx to connect the whole thing.

If you need a public HTTP endpoint to test different response code but not payloads feel free to use mock.codes[1].

I built this a couple of years ago when I wanted to experiment with AWS API Gateway. The entire project is hard-coded definitions in API Gateway with a domain (I don't log anything). It costs me a trivial amount to host (~$0.51/mo, 99% of which is the R53 hosted zone + domain cost) so I'll be keeping it up indefinitely since I use it for some projects of mine.

[1] https://mock.codes

I've done this a couple times in the past for projects where I owned the back-end and the front-end was outsourced. I documented the API spec, mocked the API to return hard-coded values, and wrote tests to cover the expected test cases.

It was a bit of work up front, but it made the eventual integration almost seamless. In this case, I manually created the endpoints and mocked return values. If I did it again, I'd probably use something more automated like some of the other posters have mentioned.

I personally will usually mock out the api using Node/Express and link endpoints to hardcoded json files.

When I just need to read some response content I chuck some JSON on pastebin.com

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