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I avoid writing automated tests that hit an external API - especially one out of my control - because I don't want my CI runs to ever fail because someone else's service wasn't responding. I want CI to be a completely closed box, such that any failures mean there's a bug in my code.
If I want to test external APIs I'll do that in a separate set of integration tests which are run as part of a separate system, not as part of my CI for every code commit to my repo.
I mostly use Python, and the APIs I talk to are mostly accessed via the requests or httpx libraries - both of which have excellent libraries for productive mocking:
- https://requests-mock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pytest.html
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Depends on the API and how much testing you need. You want to test your code, not the API's availability or correctness.
But it can be as easy as using a fake http library and mocking the responses, or using a httptest server: https://onsi.github.io/gomega/#ghttp-testing-http-clients
If the API is complicated and you have to write your own fake server, that might not make sense for small projects.
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