Hamms: a misbehaving HTTP server for testing your clients | Hacker News Reader

Hamms: a misbehaving HTTP server for testing your clients

github.com

66 pointsnreece10 comments

Having written a web crawler recently, it's surprising just how many misbehaving servers are actually out there.

Without proper error handling, a wide randomly seeded crawl would hit some form of malformed response or bizarre header within 15 minutes at the most. I eventually gave up on trying to parse all the myriad odd behaviours and now just dump them all onto a blacklist and move the crawler on.

This really is a cool one. The different ports makes it very suitable for handling a specific kind of problem. It might also be nice if there was a port that responded with a random selection from the errors (or with a proper response). e.g. "Port 5599: All of the above, at random"

Yeah this is a good idea. I think I'm gonna change the default behavior for that port

A friend of mine wrote bane, which does similar stuff in Ruby: https://github.com/danielwellman/bane/

A thing along these lines that I have come across before is http://pathod.net/. How do they compare?

In terms of functionality they are basically the same :) pathod has one server that behaves differently depending on the request you send. Hamms has different servers listening on different ports. I thought the interface was a little nicer that way. (I'm the author of hamms).

I tried to add some things as well that make testing easier when I am writing a client. Testing retry logic is hard for example because the client is making the same request a bunch of times in a row so you have to either mock the client request or make the server return different things based on the same request. I added a server that errors twice and then returns a 200, to make that easier to test.

Having ability to forward requests to an actual API of my service seems to be nice-to-have feature. (Especially for 5512 and 5513 ports, where actual correct 200 OK responses are expected.)

Any plans on that?

Not at the moment... could use runscope.com or set up nginx as a proxy maybe ?

On this note, does anyone know about a 'misbehaving' HTTP client for testing servers?

From another comment http://pathod.net/docs/pathoc

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