testing-hapi

Example Hapi-backed API Server with testing, CI, and Swagger documentation generator.

Updated and tested with latest hapi packages as of 8/4/2016.

How to run

Requires Node v5.2.0+

  npm install #install dependencies
  npm start # start server
  npm test # run tests

Details

• Notable npms

  • hapi, joi
    • hapi is a popular web/services nodejs framework. It is strict about routing and validation out of the box and has a mature plugin/extension system. I've used express for a long time, but since trying hapi, I haven't really looked back. On the surface the two frameworks look similar. In my experience though, I found that hapi managed to scale much better with increasing complexity and made it easier to test, debug, and write better code.
    • joi is an awesome schema/object definition and validation library. This project uses it enfoce API input/output validation and generate documentation.
  • hapi-swagger
    • Swagger is an API framework and standard. hapi-swagger is a hapi plugin that generates awesome interactive API documentation & UI right from our code API definitions. I gotta say... it's really nice to keep everything in one place.
  • lab
    • lab is hapi's version of mocha. It's a test runner, nicely packaged with a linter and code-coverage reporter. Nothing you wouldn't expect here. (Unless you've never written tests)

• Testing

  • Unit Tests (/test/unit/*)
    • Functions containing business logic are defined in isolation from the framework making them testable without a running server
  • Functional Tests (test/functional/*)
    • These tests are meant to target the API endpoints, covering functionality end-to-end.
    • We should try to write these tests in a way that they become easily exportable to run automatically via tools like New Relic Synthetics
  • ESLint
    • lab also includes a linter (eslint by default), which is executed when tests run. The default configuration can be customized via the .eslintrc.json file.
  • Code Coverage
    • lab analyzes the code and returns the code coverage ratio when running the test. It also points out which lines of code are missing coverage. A nice reminder to write tests for any newly added functionality.

• Documentation

  • hapi-swagger is configured in app.js and generates a very nice html page with an interactive Swagger compatible API.
  • Once your server is running locally, visit http://localhost:3000 to check out the docs.
  • My typical workflow is to write the documentation first (by setting up the hapi routing #2BirdsWith1Stone), then to write the functional tests, then a combination of code and unit tests ala TDD until I'm satisfied with the results.

• CI

  • This repo also integrates TravisCI, which runs the tests defined above on every pull request, blocking a merge if the test does not pass. Not very useful for a one person project, but crucial when a team of developers is involved.

TODO

• add stubbing framework to imitate real external service calls.
• Figure out an easy way to test multiple hapi services together, in a microservice environment.
• Integrate boom for API error responses.