iron-mockside

Introduction

A mock web server useful for testing

The principle is similar to other mock servers: you can specify the response based on criteria in the request.

What makes iron-mockside different is that it allows access to the full request as one piece of text, both headers and body. It does not do any decoding or processing.

Also it can be configured with timers: the same request will generate different responses depending on how long has passed since a certain moment. This way you can simulate interactions like polling an endpoint for a result that changes in time.

Running iron-mockside

Current executable is built for linux x64 targets. Source code is available on github if you want to compile it for a different target.

The command line allows to specify a ip address and port and a configuration file.

 "run": "iron-mockside 0.0.0.0:8080 mocks/conf.txt

The command above will make iron-mockside listen to all network adapters on port 8080, change directory to mocks and read the conf.txt file from there.

Configuration

The configuration of iron-mockside is done via one config file. It contains a list of criteria and reponses separated by empty lines.

Lines starting with # (hash) are considered comments and ignored.

Each response is a group of lines. Last line in the group is a list of files separated by ; (semicolon) that will be send back to the requester concatenated in the order they are written in the line. This allows to reuse some parts of the answer like subset of headers for example.

The reponse is literally what is contained in those files, including the http status line.

All other lines are criteria to be searched in the request, body and headers. First group from the config file to fully match will be the reply.

The default response is the 404.html file.

In the file line, if the first entry starts with ` (back tick) it means time.

• `reset will set the internal timer to now
• `after 1000 means only execute this after 1000 milliseconds have passed since reset. Because first in the list is first served, put longer times first.
• `delay 1000 means the reply will delay with 1000 milliseconds since the timer was reset.

Optionally, a profile label could be added which would make the response specific to the current profile.

Example config file:

GET /hello
headers;hello.html

# reset internal timer
/reset
`reset;headers;reset.html

# only match 5000 milliseconds after reset
/after time
`after 5000;headers;time2.html

# only match 1000 milliseconds after reset
/time
`delay 1000;headers;time1.html

The location of the files that constitute the answer content is considered relative to the location of the configuration file.

The Github repository contains a directory with a simple configuration example: mocks