Mocking External Api For Testing With Python

Context I am trying to write tests for functions that query an external API. These functions send requests to the API, get responses and process them. In my tests, I want to simula

Solution 1:

In the comments, it sounds like you solved your main problem, but you're interested in learning how to mock out the web requests instead of launching a dummy web server.

Here's a tutorial on mocking web API requests, and the gory details are in the documentation. If you're using legacy Python, you can install the mock module as a separate package from PyPI.

Here's a snippet from the tutorial:

@patch('project.services.requests.get')
def test_getting_todos_when_response_is_ok(mock_get):
    todos = [{
        'userId': 1,
        'id': 1,
        'title': 'Make the bed',
        'completed': False
    }]

    # Configure the mock to return a response with an OK status code. Also, the mock should have
    # a `json()` method that returns a list of todos.
    mock_get.return_value = Mock(ok=True)
    mock_get.return_value.json.return_value = todos

    # Call the service, which will send a request to the server.
    response = get_todos()

    # If the request is sent successfully, then I expect a response to be returned.
    assert_list_equal(response.json(), todos)