renovate VS Nock

Navigate to the Mend Renovate App on the GitHub Marketplace: https://github.com/apps/renovate.

You commit your docker-compose.yml file(s) to a GitHub repo (don't commit secrets!!), then add the Renovate App to your repo, merge the onboarding PR, then you'll get PRs when an image is updated.

I can't figure out and my google-fu is failing but what is the difference between using the Renovate App [https://github.com/apps/renovate] and using the Action [https://github.com/renovatebot/github-action]

renovate[bot] posted on May 05, 2023

I want to gather some statistics to see for example how many repositories have installed Renovate: https://github.com/apps/renovate

Use a dependency updater like dependabot or https://github.com/apps/renovate.

On the GitHub Marketplace, search for the Renovate app and click install. Select the organization or account where you wish to install Renovate. Next, choose whether to install Renovate across all of your repositories or just one particular one. We will only select one repository in this article.

It's a breeze to set up Renovate on your repositories. Just browse the GitHub Renovate app and click on the big gree Install button in the top right corner. Choose which organization and which repositories you'll install Renovate in.

Firstly, you'd want to integrate Renovate with your GitHub account from here. Then click install, and follow the steps as instructed. While configuring, Renovate lets you decide, if it should run on all the repositories by default or to run on only on specified repositories, select the option as you wish (Note: If you'd want, Renovate to run on forked repositories, Selecting All repositories would skip forked repos by default, in such cases, you'd want to manually add the forked repo(s)). Soon after setting up Renovate with the required repositories, an onboarding PR is submitted by the Renovate bot which contains information like configuration summary and what packages/dependencies are supposed to be upgraded. For demonstration purposes, I've forked a repo from my GitHub account that is supposedly a mobile application built on React Native, which is no longer maintained, so it'd serve as a good example to test on. If you follow the above steps correctly, you should see an onboarding PR similar to this:

Setting up Renovate is a matter of installing the hosted app, and configuring it by adding a renovate.json in the root of the repository. You can also install and run the Renovate CLI tool to get feedback on all your commits.

So, why would you want a REAL server to mock request/reponses? You have a lot of intercepts today that sit on the network layer and you can define things like "If you send request to that endpoint, with that json, please return that Status" (for NodeJS example, Nock - https://github.com/nock/nock)

That said, folks seem to like "recording" features in these sorts of tools (Ruby's VCR, nock, etc), so maybe there's a future where I add something similar. I've always just found the ergonomics of those features awkward to deal with, especially having to flip back and forth between tests and fixtures files to figure out what's wired to what, but maybe there's a clean solution... perhaps a "live request" mode that just prints mock code snippets of request/response pairs passing through your app.

While not mocking per say I usually use nock for http calls. You can use nock.recorder.rec() to capture the http call to play back during test, That way you are always using "live" code but not making real calls to servers.

I looked at the service which is used to get the feed URLs from a blog URL and noticed it takes the html response of the blog URL and gets the links ( tags) by checking the type attribute value against a list of valid feed values. So, I decided to use a similar approach by getting the html response for a provided URL and checking the Content-Type header against a list of valid MIME types for a feed. I ended up updating the logic to test if a URL is a feed URL, returning it if true. If the URL is found to not be a feed URL, it would try to get the feed URLs assuming the URL is a blog URL. I tested and confirmed that the new logic worked for both blog and feed URLs. Then, I added some tests for the new function I added to test for a feed URL. Testing this ended up being simpler than I expected as all I had to do was mock the response of a test url (using nock), and then check if the function returned the correct boolean value for a url. I created a PR and noticed that some of the tests in another file were now failing. While I was investigating this, I got a review on my PR, requesting me to add another test to the file which had the failing tests. That file tested the API service as a whole. I found out that nock only mocks a URL's response for one request by default. And since I was now checking for a feed URL as well, the function which returned the feed URLs from a blog URL was throwing an error since the nock for that was used up. To fix this, I had to specify in the nock statement to mock the URL response for two requests:

There are libraries like https://github.com/nock/nock to prevent mocking the whole axios.

Use nock: https://github.com/nock/nock

Going based off the documentation I sent you in my last reply, there is an example that uses nock to emulate api responses. I haven't used nock myself, but the example seems pretty simple to use. You just need to take the example and change the response object to be the shape of what your getStuffFromDatabase function returns. That way your useCategory function runs as close to normally as possible, while providing a mock response value instead of hitting the database.

If you’re willing to venture into nodejs territory, then nock is a fantastic and simple to set up http mock server. https://github.com/nock/nock