How do I unit test a module that relies on urllib2?

Question

I've got a piece of code that I can't figure out how to unit test! The module pulls content from external XML feeds (twitter, flickr, youtube, etc.) with urllib2. Here's some pseudo-code for it:

params = (url, urlencode(data),) if data else (url,)
req = Request(*params)
response = urlopen(req)
#check headers, content-length, etc...
#parse the response XML with lxml...

My first thought was to pickle the response and load it for testing, but apparently urllib's response object is unserializable (it raises an exception).

Just saving the XML from the response body isn't ideal, because my code uses the header information too. It's designed to act on a response object.

And of course, relying on an external source for data in a unit test is a horrible idea.

So how do I write a unit test for this?

Answer 1

It would be best if you could write a mock urlopen (and possibly Request) which provides the minimum required interface to behave like urllib2's version. You'd then need to have your function/method which uses it able to accept this mock urlopen somehow, and use urllib2.urlopen otherwise.

This is a fair amount of work, but worthwhile. Remember that python is very friendly to ducktyping, so you just need to provide some semblance of the response object's properties to mock it.

For example:

class MockResponse(object):
    def __init__(self, resp_data, code=200, msg='OK'):
        self.resp_data = resp_data
        self.code = code
        self.msg = msg
        self.headers = {'content-type': 'text/xml; charset=utf-8'}

    def read(self):
        return self.resp_data

    def getcode(self):
        return self.code

    # Define other members and properties you want

def mock_urlopen(request):
    return MockResponse(r'<xml document>')

Granted, some of these are difficult to mock, because for example I believe the normal "headers" is an HTTPMessage which implements fun stuff like case-insensitive header names. But, you might be able to simply construct an HTTPMessage with your response data.

Answer 2

Build a separate class or module responsible for communicating with your external feeds.

Make this class able to be a test double. You're using python, so you're pretty golden there; if you were using C#, I'd suggest either in interface or virtual methods.

In your unit test, insert a test double of the external feed class. Test that your code uses the class correctly, assuming that the class does the work of communicating with your external resources correctly. Have your test double return fake data rather than live data; test various combinations of the data and of course the possible exceptions urllib2 could throw.

Aand... that's it.

You can't effectively automate unit tests that rely on external sources, so you're best off not doing it. Run an occasional integration test on your communication module, but don't include those tests as part of your automated tests.

Edit:

Just a note on the difference between my answer and @Crast's answer. Both are essentially correct, but they involve different approaches. In Crast's approach, you use a test double on the library itself. In my approach, you abstract the use of the library away into a separate module and test double that module.

Which approach you use is entirely subjective; there's no "correct" answer there. I prefer my approach because it allows me to build more modular, flexible code, something I value. But it comes at a cost in terms of additional code to write, something that may not be valued in many agile situations.

Answer 3

I think the easiest thing to do is to actually create a simple web server in your unit test. When you start the test, create a new thread that listens on some arbitrary port and when a client connects just returns a known set of headers and XML, then terminates.

I can elaborate if you need more info.

Here's some code:

import threading, SocketServer, time

# a request handler
class SimpleRequestHandler(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler):
    def handle(self):
        data = self.request.recv(102400) # token receive
        senddata = file(self.server.datafile).read() # read data from unit test file
        self.request.send(senddata)
        time.sleep(0.1) # make sure it finishes receiving request before closing
        self.request.close()

def serve_data(datafile):
    server = SocketServer.TCPServer(('127.0.0.1', 12345), SimpleRequestHandler)
    server.datafile = datafile
    http_server_thread = threading.Thread(target=server.handle_request())

To run your unit test, call serve_data() then call your code that requests a URL that looks like http://localhost:12345/anythingyouwant.

Answer 4

urllib2 has a functions called build_opener() and install_opener() which you should use to mock the behaviour of urlopen()

import urllib2
from StringIO import StringIO

def mock_response(req):
    if req.get_full_url() == "http://example.com":
        resp = urllib2.addinfourl(StringIO("mock file"), "mock message", req.get_full_url())
        resp.code = 200
        resp.msg = "OK"
        return resp

class MyHTTPHandler(urllib2.HTTPHandler):
    def http_open(self, req):
        print "mock opener"
        return mock_response(req)

my_opener = urllib2.build_opener(MyHTTPHandler)
urllib2.install_opener(my_opener)

response=urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com")
print response.read()
print response.code
print response.msg

Answer 5

Why not just mock a website that returns the response you expect? then start the server in a thread in setup and kill it in the teardown. I ended up doing this for testing code that would send email by mocking an smtp server and it works great. Surely something more trivial could be done for http...

from smtpd import SMTPServer
from time import sleep
import asyncore
SMTP_PORT = 6544

class MockSMTPServer(SMTPServer):
    def __init__(self, localaddr, remoteaddr, cb = None):
        self.cb = cb
        SMTPServer.__init__(self, localaddr, remoteaddr)

    def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data):
        print (peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data)
        if self.cb:
            self.cb(peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data)
        self.close()

def start_smtp(cb, port=SMTP_PORT):

    def smtp_thread():
        _smtp = MockSMTPServer(("127.0.0.1", port), (None, 0), cb)
        asyncore.loop()
        return Thread(None, smtp_thread)


def test_stuff():
        #.......snip noise
        email_result = None

        def email_back(*args):
            email_result = args

        t = start_smtp(email_back)
        t.start()
        sleep(1)

        res.form["email"]= self.admin_email
        res = res.form.submit()
        assert res.status_int == 302,"should've redirected"


        sleep(1)
        assert email_result is not None, "didn't get an email"

Answer 6

You can use pymox to mock the behavior of anything and everything in the urllib2 (or any other) package. It's 2010, you shouldn't be writing your own mock classes.