Simple webserver or web testing framework

Question

Need to testcase a complex webapp which does some interacting with a remote 3rd party cgi based webservices. Iam planing to implement some of the 3rd party services in a dummy webserver, so that i have full controll about the testcases. Looking for a simple python http webserver or framework to emulate the 3rd party interface.

Answer 1

I would look into Django.

Answer 2

You might be happiest with a WSGI service, since it's most like CGI.

Look at werkzeug.

Answer 3

Take a look the standard module wsgiref:

http://www.python.org/doc/2.6/library/wsgiref.html

At the end of that page is a small example. Something like this could already be sufficient for your needs.

Answer 4

Use cherrypy, take a look at Hello World:

import cherrypy

class HelloWorld(object):
    def index(self):
        return "Hello World!"
    index.exposed = True

cherrypy.quickstart(HelloWorld())

Run this code and you have a very fast Hello World server ready on localhost port 8080!! Pretty easy huh?

Answer 5

It might be simpler sense to mock (or stub, or whatever the term is) urllib, or whatever module you are using to communicate with the remote web-service?

Even simply overriding urllib.urlopen might be enough:

import urllib
from StringIO import StringIO

class mock_response(StringIO):
    def info(self):
        raise NotImplementedError("mocked urllib response has no info method")
    def getinfo():
        raise NotImplementedError("mocked urllib response has no getinfo method")

def urlopen(url):
    if url == "http://example.com/api/something":
        resp = mock_response("<xml></xml>")
        return resp
    else:
        urllib.urlopen(url)


is_unittest = True

if is_unittest:
    urllib.urlopen = urlopen

print urllib.urlopen("http://example.com/api/something").read()

I used something very similar here, to emulate a simple API, before I got an API key.