Stale Fish

StaleFish is a utility for storing web requests as fixtures, faking web requests, and ensuring fixtures stay fresh by checking request at periodic intervals. It works at a global level, without modifying code or writing extensive stubs.

NOTICE

1.3.x is a complete rewrite of the StaleFish utility. It is incompatible with previous versions of StaleFish.

Features

Manage FakeWeb through StaleFish
Fixtures are updated based on a per-fixture update interval
Fixture update interval supports the ActiveSupport relative time DSL (ex. ‘30.minutes’, ‘2.days’, ‘1.year’)
Configuration file and fixture data is version control friendly
Specify which fixtures are checked for freshness using :all, :only, & :except arguement options
Force update of all fixtures regardless of freshness (bypass freshness check)
Test Framework agnostic (tested with Test::Unit & RSpec)

How To

Simply drop in a YAML file in your application (recommended location: test/spec/fixtures/stale_fish.yml) and issue the following commands.

A sample YAML file:

--- !omap
- stale:
  - twitter:                                        # fixture name (this must be unique)
    file: 'timeline.json'                           # fixture save location
    update_interval: 30.days                        # update interval
    check_against: http://twitter.com/api/timeline  # data to update fixture with when stale
    request_type: POST                              # request type to use when updating: GET, POST
    update_method: StaleFishFixture.update_me       # optional: this method is evaluated for a response instead of hitting the check_against param
    last_updated_at:                                # timestamp of last fixture update (can be left blank)
  - gh_commits:
    file: 'commits.xml'
    update_interval: 3.days
    check_against: http://api.github.com/commits.xml
    request_type: GET
    last_updated_at:

Specify one block for every fixture you would like to update. The frequency field takes any relative date included in the ActiveSupport library.

RSpec

For a single test add it to a before block

describe UsersController do
  before do
    StaleFish.update_stale
  end
  ....
end

For all tests add the following to spec_helper.rb

require 'stale_fish'

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  ...
  config.before :suite do
    StaleFish.update_stale
  end
  ....
end

Test::Unit

For all tests add the following to test_helper.rb

class Test::Unit::TestCase
  ...
  setup do
    StaleFish.update_stale
  end
  ...
end

More Info

View the wiki: wiki.github.com/jsmestad/stale_fish

Thanks

This utility uses FakeWeb, thanks to those contributors for their excellent work.