Ways to Unit Test Oauth for different services in ruby?

Question

Are there any best practices in writing unit tests when 90% of the time I'm building the Oauth connecting class, I need to actually be logging into the remote service?

I am building a rubygem that logs in to Twitter/Google/MySpace, etc., and the hardest part is making sure I have the settings right for that particular provider, and I would like to write tests for that.

Is there a recommended way to do that? If I did mocks or stubs, I'd still have to spend that 90% of the time figuring out how to use the service, and would end up writing tests after the fact instead of before...

On a related note, if I created test API keys for each Oauth provider, and I just used it for the gem for testing purposes, is there any issue in leaving the api key and secret in plain view in the tests? So other people could test it out more realistically too.

Answer 1

nothing wrong with hitting live services in your integration tests.

you should stub out the oauth part completely in your unit tests though

If you're planning on open sourcing the code you're writing, leaving API keys in the code might not be a good idea as you might hit API usage limits or rate limiting when the gem becomes popular and people run the tests frequently which will lead to unexpected test failures.