Clack-pretend: a testing and debugging tool for Clack.

Are you tired of jumping to your web browser every time you need to test your work in Clack? Clack-pretend will capture and replay calls to your clack middleware stack. When developing a web application with clack, you will often find it inconvenient to run your code from the lisp REPL because it expects a clack environment, including perhaps, cookies or a logged-in user. With clack-pretend, you can run prior web requests from your REPL, moving development back where it belongs.

Setup

First, replace lack:builder or clack:builder:

(lack:builder
  ...

with pretend-builder:

(clack-pretend:pretend-builder (:insert 3)
  ...

Pretend builder, aside from its recording features, is a thin wrapper around lack:builder.

The :insert parameter is where pretend will capture the environment and output. For example given this app:

(clack-pretend:pretend-builder (:insert 3)
  (:static :path "~/public_html/")
  :accesslog
  :session
  (custom-middleware param)
  (my-app))

The collection point will be inserted just after the session middleware, and just before custom-middleware.

To use clack-pretend, restart your clack app and visit a page with your web browser.

Quick summary

(quick-summary)

This function gives a list of URLs that have been captured.

Info functions

Most of the info functions hava an optional parameter named index. The default is 0, or the last request received by the stack. By default clack-pretend stores up to 10 requests. Higher indices retrieve older requests.

(last-input (&optional (index 0))

The input environment as it was received from the middleware above the insertion point.

(last-output (&optional (index 0))

The output of the app below the insertion point.

(last-request-object (&optional (index 0))

A clack request object generated from the results of last-input.

(last-request-url ())        

The URL of the last request.

(last-session (&optional (index 0))

The session object from the last request.

(last-as-code (&optional (index 0))

Attempts to output the last environment and session as usable source code. This is useful for turning a web request into something usable as a unit test for your middleware.

Running your last request

> (run-pretend)

Runs the last web request starting below the insert point with the saved environment information from above the insert point.

Author

Ben McGunigle (bnmcgn at gmail.com)

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2017 Ben McGunigle

License

Apache License version 2.0