Service virtualization

Christoph Kappel · · , , , · Reading time 5 minutes

If you’ve ever written a test for software, that wasn’t designed to be tested, you probably know the problem of mixed up business logic through-out the layers. And it gets even worse, when your use case isn’t isolated into a single service and relies on some external communication with other ones.

Containerization e.g. via Podman eases the pain and allows to run instances of all required services along with our service in a complex integration test. Alas, this solution doesn’t scale well, especially when the required services have further requirements themselves and you basically have to start up a whole landscape or are really difficult to set up.

In this post I want to demonstrate another option namely service virtualization, which allows to consider these kind of requirements as a blackbox and (to further stretch this metaphor) to record and playback requests.

Sounds interesting? Let me introduce you to Hoverfly.

Hoverfly &

Simply speaking, Hoverfly acts like a transparent proxy and can be easily hooked up into the JVM via the JUnit5 extension lifecycle. From there, it can record requests, simulate them or even do both at once, when the destination address isn’t reachable.

Simple example &

This is probably easier to understand with a simple example:

public class IdServiceTest {
    private static final String SERVICE_URL = "localhost:8085";

    @ClassRule
    public static HoverflyRule hoverfly = hoverfly.inSimulationMode( (1)
        dsl( (2)
            service(SERVICE_URL)
                .get("/id")
                .willReturn(
                    success(UUID.randomUUID().toString(), MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)) (3)
        )
    );

    @Test
    public void shouldGetId() {
        given()
            .spec(new RequestSpecBuilder().setBaseUri("http://" + SERVICE_URL).build())
        .when()
            .get("/id")
        .then()
            .statusCode(200); (4)
    }
}
1 Start Hoverfly in simulation mode.
2 Use the DSL to configure the reply.
3 Return a new UUID on a request to /id.
4 Stupidly check the status code.

Integration in Quarkus &

The general test setup in Quarkus is a bit different and can be greatly eased by using a test lifecycle manager:

If you are interested into the why, please see this issues on GitHub. 
public class HoverflyResource implements QuarkusTestResourceLifecycleManager {
    private static final String SERVICE_URL = "localhost:8085";

    private Hoverfly hoverfly;

    @Override
    public Map<String, String> start() {
        this.hoverfly = new Hoverfly(HoverflyConfig.localConfigs()
                .proxyLocalHost()
                .destination(SERVICE_URL)
                .proxyPort(8080), HoverflyMode.SIMULATE); (1)

        this.hoverfly.start();
        this.hoverfly.simulate(
            dsl(
                service(SERVICE_URL)
                    .get("/id")
                    .willReturn(
                        success(UUID.randomUUID().toString(), MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON) (2)
                    )
                )
            );

        return Map.of("id.service.url", SERVICE_URL); (3)
    }

    @Override
    public void stop() {
        this.hoverfly.close();
    }
}
1 Configure Hoverfly to run in simulation mode.
2 Also define a UUID for a reply.
3 Expose the service url for convenience. 
@QuarkusTest
@QuarkusTestResource(value = HoverflyResource.class, restrictToAnnotatedClass = true) (1)
public class TestIdServiceHoverfly {

    @ConfigProperty(name = "id.service.url", defaultValue = "") (2)
    String serviceUrl;

    @Test
    public void shouldGetId() {
        given()
            .spec(new RequestSpecBuilder().setBaseUri("http://" + this.serviceUrl).build())
        .when()
            .get("/id")
        .then()
            .statusCode(200); (3)
    }
1 Restrict this resource to annotated test classes, otherwise it is always started for other tests as well.
2 Fetch the service url from config.
3 And do our stupid test again.

Conclusion &

Both examples demonstrate, how Hoverfly can easily be used to simulate requests sent to specific addresses and allows easier testing of tightly coupled services, without firing them up.

There is a plethora of other cool features bundled into Hoverfly which I haven't mentioned here, like verification of messages or even to act a standalone web server, so please check it out for yourself.

As always, here is my showcase with some more examples:

https://github.com/unexist/showcase-integration-testing-quarkus