vcr VS Knapsack

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

I've created a knapsack ruby gem for CI parallelisation that has over 122 million downloads. Primarily due to the fact, Gitlab is using it.

I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we are helping our customers run fast CI builds.

name: Main on: [push] jobs: test: runs-on: ubuntu-latest # If you need DB like PostgreSQL, Redis then define service below. # https://github.com/actions/example-services/tree/master/.github/workflows services: postgres: image: postgres:10.8 env: POSTGRES_USER: postgres POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "" POSTGRES_DB: postgres ports: - 5432:5432 # needed because the postgres container does not provide a healthcheck # tmpfs makes DB faster by using RAM options: >- --mount type=tmpfs,destination=/var/lib/postgresql/data --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5 redis: image: redis ports: - 6379:6379 options: --entrypoint redis-server # https://help.github.com/en/articles/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idstrategymatrix strategy: fail-fast: false matrix: # [n] - where the n is a number of parallel jobs you want to run your tests on. # Use a higher number if you have slow tests to split them between more parallel jobs. # Remember to update the value of the `ci_node_index` below to (0..n-1). ci_node_total: [8] # Indexes for parallel jobs (starting from zero). # E.g. use [0, 1] for 2 parallel jobs, [0, 1, 2] for 3 parallel jobs, etc. ci_node_index: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] env: RAILS_ENV: test GEMFILE_RUBY_VERSION: 2.7.2 PGHOST: localhost PGUSER: postgres # Rails verifies the time zone in DB is the same as the time zone of the Rails app TZ: "Europe/Warsaw" steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Set up Ruby uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1 with: # Not needed with a .ruby-version file ruby-version: 2.7 # runs 'bundle install' and caches installed gems automatically bundler-cache: true - name: Create DB run: | bin/rails db:prepare - name: Run tests env: KNAPSACK_PRO_TEST_SUITE_TOKEN_RSPEC: ${{ secrets.KNAPSACK_PRO_TEST_SUITE_TOKEN_RSPEC }} KNAPSACK_PRO_CI_NODE_TOTAL: ${{ matrix.ci_node_total }} KNAPSACK_PRO_CI_NODE_INDEX: ${{ matrix.ci_node_index }} KNAPSACK_PRO_LOG_LEVEL: info # if you use Knapsack Pro Queue Mode you must set below env variable # to be able to retry CI build and run previously recorded tests # https://github.com/KnapsackPro/knapsack_pro-ruby#knapsack_pro_fixed_queue_split-remember-queue-split-on-retry-ci-node KNAPSACK_PRO_FIXED_QUEUE_SPLIT: true # RSpec split test files by test examples feature - it's optional # https://knapsackpro.com/faq/question/how-to-split-slow-rspec-test-files-by-test-examples-by-individual-it KNAPSACK_PRO_RSPEC_SPLIT_BY_TEST_EXAMPLES: true run: | bundle exec rake knapsack_pro:queue:rspec

# Ruby CircleCI 2.0 configuration file # # Check https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/language-ruby/ for more details # version: 2 jobs: build: parallelism: 10 # https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#resource_class resource_class: small docker: # specify the version you desire here - image: circleci/ruby:2.7.1-node-browsers environment: PGHOST: 127.0.0.1 PGUSER: my_db_user RAILS_ENV: test # Split slow RSpec test files by test examples # https://knapsackpro.com/faq/question/how-to-split-slow-rspec-test-files-by-test-examples-by-individual-it KNAPSACK_PRO_RSPEC_SPLIT_BY_TEST_EXAMPLES: true # Specify service dependencies here if necessary # CircleCI maintains a library of pre-built images # documented at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/circleci-images/ - image: circleci/postgres:10.6-alpine-ram environment: POSTGRES_DB: my_db_name POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "" POSTGRES_USER: my_db_user # Rails verifies Time Zone in DB is the same as time zone of the Rails app TZ: "Europe/Warsaw" - image: redis:6.0.7 working_directory: ~/repo environment: TZ: "Europe/Warsaw" steps: - checkout # Download and cache dependencies - restore_cache: keys: - v2-dependencies-bundler-{{ checksum "Gemfile.lock" }}-{{ checksum ".ruby-version" }} # fallback to using the latest cache if no exact match is found - v2-dependencies-bundler- - run: name: install ruby dependencies command: | bundle install --jobs=4 --retry=3 --path vendor/bundle - save_cache: paths: - ./vendor/bundle key: v2-dependencies-bundler-{{ checksum "Gemfile.lock" }}-{{ checksum ".ruby-version" }} # Database setup - run: bin/rails db:prepare - run: name: run tests command: | export CIRCLE_TEST_REPORTS=/tmp/test-results mkdir $CIRCLE_TEST_REPORTS bundle exec rake "knapsack_pro:queue:rspec[--format documentation --format RspecJunitFormatter --out tmp/rspec.xml]" # collect reports - store_test_results: path: /tmp/test-results - store_artifacts: path: /tmp/test-results destination: test-results

One, the interesting out-of-the-box solution is Knapsack Pro. It helps run your tests in a parallel efficient way.