PactNet primarily provides a fluent .NET DSL for describing HTTP requests that will be made to a service provider and the HTTP responses the consumer expects back to function correctly.
In documenting the consumer interactions, we can replay them on the provider and ensure the provider responds as expected. This basically gives us complete test symmetry and removes the basic need for integrated tests.
PactNet also has the ability to support other mock providers should we see fit.
PactNet is Version 2.0 compliant, and we now use the Ruby standalone engine as we move towards a common core approach. To enable Version 2.0 support, make sure you supply a PactConfig object with SpecificationVersion = "2.0.0" when creating the PactBuilder.
In reaching Version 2.0 compliance, we have made some breaking changes. This readme details the current latest version.
See Version 1.0 readme for the previous version.
"Pact" is an implementation of "consumer driven contract" testing that allows mocking of responses in the consumer codebase, and verification of the interactions in the provider codebase. The initial implementation was written in Ruby for Rack apps, however a consumer and provider may be implemented in different programming languages, so the "mocking" and the "verifying" steps would be best supported by libraries in their respective project's native languages. Given that the pact file is written in JSON, it should be straightforward to implement a pact library in any language, however, to get the best experience and most reliability of out mixing pact libraries, the matching logic for the requests and responses needs to be identical. There is little confidence to be gained in having your pacts "pass" if the logic used to verify a "pass" is inconsistent between implementations.
PactNet was initially built at SEEK to help solve some of the challenges faced with testing across service boundaries.
The project now lives in the pact-foundation GH organisation, to help group and support the official Pact libraries.
Massive thanks to the SEEK team for all the time and hard work put into this library.
When debugging a test locally (either consumer or provider) if you click the stop button in your test runner, it will abort the process abruptly and the ruby runtime will not get cleaned up. If you do this, simply kill the ruby process from your task/process manager. We recommend you play the test through to the end to avoid this issue. See https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-net/issues/108 for more details.
var content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
var status = response.StatusCode;
reasonPhrase = response.ReasonPhrase; //NOTE: any Pact mock provider errors will be returned here and in the response body
request.Dispose();
response.Dispose();
if (status == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
return !String.IsNullOrEmpty(content) ?
JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Something>(content)
: null;
}
throw new Exception(reasonPhrase);
}
}
2. Describe and configure the pact as a service consumer with a mock service#
Create a new test case within your service consumer test project, using whatever test framework you like (in this case we used xUnit).
This should only be instantiated once for the consumer you are testing.
public class ConsumerMyApiPact : IDisposable
{
public IPactBuilder PactBuilder { get; private set; }
public IMockProviderService MockProviderService { get; private set; }
public int MockServerPort { get { return 9222; } }
public string MockProviderServiceBaseUri { get { return String.Format("http://localhost:{0}", MockServerPort); } }
public ConsumerMyApiPact()
{
PactBuilder = new PactBuilder(); //Defaults to specification version 1.1.0, uses default directories. PactDir: ..\..\pacts and LogDir: ..\..\logs
//or
PactBuilder = new PactBuilder(new PactConfig { SpecificationVersion = "2.0.0" }); //Configures the Specification Version
//or
PactBuilder = new PactBuilder(new PactConfig { PactDir = @"..\pacts", LogDir = @"c:\temp\logs" }); //Configures the PactDir and/or LogDir.
PactBuilder
.ServiceConsumer("Consumer")
.HasPactWith("Something API");
MockProviderService = PactBuilder.MockService(MockServerPort); //Configure the http mock server
//or
MockProviderService = PactBuilder.MockService(MockServerPort, true); //By passing true as the second param, you can enabled SSL. A self signed SSL cert will be provisioned by default.
//or
MockProviderService = PactBuilder.MockService(MockServerPort, true, sslCert: sslCert, sslKey: sslKey); //By passing true as the second param and an sslCert and sslKey, you can enabled SSL with a custom certificate. See "Using a Custom SSL Certificate" for more details.
//or
MockProviderService = PactBuilder.MockService(MockServerPort, new JsonSerializerSettings()); //You can also change the default Json serialization settings using this overload
//or
MockProviderService = PactBuilder.MockService(MockServerPort, host: IPAddress.Any); //By passing host as IPAddress.Any, the mock provider service will bind and listen on all ip addresses
}
public void Dispose()
{
PactBuilder.Build(); //NOTE: Will save the pact file once finished
If you now navigate to [RepositoryRoot]/pacts you will see the pact file your test generated. Take a moment to have a look at what it contains which is a JSON representation of the mocked requests your test made.
Everything should be green.
Note: we advise using a TDD approach when using this library, however we will leave it up to you.
Likely you will be creating a skeleton client, describing the pact, write the failing test, implement the skeleton client, run the test to make sure it passes, then rinse and repeat.
You can create the API using whatever framework you like, however this example will use ASP.NET Web API 2 with Owin.
Note: We have removed to support for Microsoft.Owin.Testing, as we have moved to using a shared Pact core. You will now be required to start the API and listen on the correct port, as part of the test.
Create a new test case within your service provider test project, using whatever test framework you like (in this case we used xUnit). PactUri method should refer to the pact json file, created when the Consumer Test was run.
public class SomethingApiTests
{
[Fact]
public void EnsureSomethingApiHonoursPactWithConsumer()
Outputters = new List<IOutput> //NOTE: We default to using a ConsoleOutput, however xUnit 2 does not capture the console output, so a custom outputter is required.
{
new XUnitOutput(_output)
},
CustomHeaders = new Dictionary<string, string>{{"Authorization", "Basic VGVzdA=="}}, //This allows the user to set request headers that will be sent with every request the verifier sends to the provider
Verbose = true //Output verbose verification logs to the test output
};
using (WebApp.Start<TestStartup>(serviceUri))
{
//Act / Assert
IPactVerifier pactVerifier = new PactVerifier(config);
var pactUriOptions = new PactUriOptions()
.SetBasicAuthentication("someuser", "somepassword") // you can specify basic auth details
//or
.SetBearerAuthentication("sometoken") // Or a bearer token
//and / or
.SetSslCaFilePath("path/to/your/ca.crt") //if you fetch your pact in https and the server certificate authorities are not in the default ca-bundle.crt
//and / or
.SetHttpProxy("http://my-http-proxy:8080"); //if you need to go through a proxy to reach the server hosting the pact
When creating the MockProviderService you can use a custom SSL cert, which allows the use of a valid installed certificate without requiring any hacks to ignore certificate validation errors.
The Pact broker is a useful tool that can be used to share pacts between the consumer and provider. In order to make this easy, below are a couple of options for publishing your Pacts to a Pact Broker.
Publishing Provider Verification Results to a Broker#
This feature allows the result of the Provider verification to be pushed to the broker and displayed on the index page.
In order for this to work you must set the ProviderVersion, PublishVerificationResults and use a pact broker uri. If you do not use a broker uri no verification results will be published. See the code snippet code below.
For more info and compatibility details refer to this.
var buildNumber = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("BUILD_NUMBER");
//Assuming build number is only set in the CI environment
var config = new PactVerifierConfig
{
ProviderVersion = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(buildNumber) ? buildNumber : null, //NOTE: This is required for this feature to work