puffing-billy VS vcr

For a lot of these features, we previously had to adopt various 3rd party gems, such as the Puffing Billy proxy (for blocking domains), the webdrivers gem (for auto-updating the Chrome drivers), etc. and although they certainly did a good job for us, now we were able to finally rip them off the project completely:

Basically, it's a record/replay tool, similar to VCR for Ruby, but on steroids and powered by AI (khm GPT khm).

I don't think it's right to say "pythagora generates integration tests". It's more of a "replay manual tests as fixtured unit tests," which makes it similar to (but more powerful than) VCR for Ruby HTTP. What I've always wanted for these kinds of "request recorders" is a way to re-validate the test fixtures over time.

For example, they might expect to be able to mock calls to your API with something like VCR or Responses.

I also started from the same starting point but then discovered and started using VCR for creating http stubs - https://github.com/vcr/vcr. It allowed me to write against more realistic and complex test scenarios but didn't support databases.

If you had bit more complex workflows or less time - you could start using a VCR library to mock out API interactions and then continue with your dockerised DBs.

I generally will use vcr[0] or something similar to record requests and then I write tests and code against that.

3rd parties go down, it happens. In general a system that is dependent on a third party should have some non exceptional behavior when that happens.

So if I’m not setup with vcr, and 3rd party is down- I would on the behavior for what happens when it’s down.

[0] https://github.com/vcr/vcr

With external APIs, you can also make use of a gem like VCR. I prefer mocks (plus unit tests around the actual deserialization of the response) to VCR in most cases, but the end result is about the same.

A way to avoid this is using the VCR gem.

We'll use a tool called vcr to capture real HTTP requests and responses, storing and using them from then on. VCR's language and terminology leans heavily into its real-world analogue. If you don't know what a VCR is, it's a box we used to hook up to TVs to watch movies before DVD players. If you don't know what a DVD player is, it's a box we used to hook up to TVs to watch movies before streaming.

[1] https://github.com/vcr/vcr