Mountebank

for honest Python developers

Title Text

Stubs

In-Process Stubs

• Works great when it works
• Tests are fast

• Sharp edge cases
• Hard to debug when it doesn't work
• Not true integration tests

Out-of-Process Stubs

 

• Closer to being integration tests
• Relatively nice API for setting up stubs

• Spawns threads in the test harness
• Not a standalone server
• Problem with teardown
• Low project activity

Out-of-Process Stubs

 

• A real OOP server built on bottle
• Manipulate stubs through HTTP client

• Always runs in foreground
• Stubbed service on the same port as the control service
• Unreasonable default behaviour
  • ​deletes stubs every few minutes

Mountebank

• Out of process stub server similar to pretenders written in NodeJS
• Simple HTTP API
• More flexible stub setup
• Multiple protocols (http, https, smtp, generic-tcp)
• Control service (imposter) can spawn stub services on different ports
• Better process handling (shutdown works better - see later slides)
• More active community and superb documentation

Did you say Node?

In dubio, uti Docker[*]

Unofficial A-Team Motto

* Roughly translates to "When In Doubt, Use More Docker"

docker run -d

dev-docker.points.com:80/mountebank

• Based on alpine
• https://github.com/kevinjqiu/docker-mountebank/blob/master/Dockerfile
• No nodejs dependencies => project folder is clean
• Daemonization through docker => shutdown/cleanup works without our effort \o/

Demos

More Advanced Features

• Stub https or any TCP requests
• Define your own predicates using Javascript
• injectors - hook that can modify proxied responses
• Web UI for adding/testing stub definitions

References

Main site:

http://www.mbtest.org/

 

Points Project uses MB:

https://github.com/Points/bgt-reporting/blob/master/tests/stubs.py

 

Python Client Libraries

https://github.com/kevinjqiu/py-mountebank

https://github.com/aholyoke/mountebank-python