thoughts of a doug

I have just uploaded a new module to the CPAN: Test::Override::UserAgent. This is geared toward developers that use LWP::UserAgent in their modules and want to easily test their code without having a live Internet connection or starting up a test server to make requests against. Just about every single module I have on the CPAN uses LWP::UserAgent and makes requests against live servers (usually they are doing web scraping). Before I was using Test::MockObject, but that was tedious at best.

The goal of Test::Override::UserAgent is to be able to write response overrides easily. The module allows for the author to create a class consisting of only definitions for overrides so the override definitions do not have to be repeated in each test file. An example override class would look like:

package t::CustomUA;
 
use 5.008;
use Test::Override::UserAgent for => 'configuration';
 
# Disable live requests (the default, anyhow)
allow_live(0);
 
override_request
  host => 'localhost',
  path => '/test',
  sub {
    return [200, ['content-type' => 'text/plain'], ['Test response']];
  };
 
1;

This will cause requests that have a host of localhost and a path of /test to get a response back of text/plain with the Test response body. This configuration can then be used in a test file:

#!perl -T
 
use 5.008;
use Test::More tests => 1;
use t::CustomUA;
 
use My::Module; # Your awesome module to test
 
my $object = new_ok 'My::Module';
 
# Your module has a way to set the user agent it uses
t::CustomUA->configuration->install_in_user_agent($object->user_agent);
 
# Perhaps your module has no way to set the user agent
# or there is something down stream that uses a user agent.
my $scope = t::CustomUA->configuration->install_in_scope;
 
# Do tests that make requests by LWP::UserAgent
 
# End the scope override
undef $scope;