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Comment by lodovic | Hacker News Reader

Wait - people are doing real http calls in unit tests, over a network, and complaining about multiple asserts in the test code?

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It's not unusual to spin up a local dev server in the same environment (or on the same machine, ie at localhost) as the tests. There's an argument to say these aren't "unit" tests but your definition of "unit" may vary.

Where I work milestone and release builds cannot make http calls other than to our maven repo. It's meant to further reproducible builds but your tests can't do this as well. I fire up an in-memory database to make my tests self containing.

Hopefully the responses are stored locally and replayed on subsequent runs.

Still a bit flaky. In an OOP language mocking is appropriate or in an FP language defunctionalization.

Heh yeah but it can be used to write tests that check your assumptions about a 3 party api. Granted, It'll only fail once the test are rerun without the cache, but it can still be a valuable technique. It can be valuable to have a testsuite that a) helps check assumptions when implementing the connection and b) helps locate what part of it later starts to behave unexpectedly.

I have met people that thinks HTTP calls are great!

- "But it tests more things!"

Well ok, but those are integration tests, not unit tests... It is unacceptable that a unit tests can fail because of external system...

It's far better to have integration tests without unit tests than the other way around.

They can be mocked surely?

It's not nice to mock people "doing real http calls in unit tests," even if they deserve it.

Oh dear

For mocking, the parent comment means "swapping out the external calls with dummy calls", not "laughing at the developer"

I'm 98% sure that they understood that and it was a joke.

You failed a humor unit test.

Woops, did you see the joke fly right past you?

define "real"

yes, we perform "somewhat real tests" - tests start the app, fake db, and call HTTP APIs

it's really decent

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