This documentation is a collection of the most common use cases, and their solutions. If you have not used this library before, it may be better to read the :ref:`tutorial` first.

To match query parameters, you must not included them to the URI, as this will not work:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_query_params_never_do_this.py
   :language: python

There's an explicit place where the query string should go:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_query_params_proper_use.py
   :language: python

The query_string is the parameter which does not contain the leading question mark ?.

As the order of the parameters in the query string usually does not matter, you can specify a dict for the query_string parameter (the naming may look a bit strange but we wanted to keep API compatibility and this dict matching feature was added later).

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_query_params_dict.py
   :language: python

In the example above, both requests pass the test as we specified the expected query string as a dictionary.

Behind the scenes an additional step is done by the library: it parses up the query_string into the dict and then compares it with the dict provided.

The simplest form of URI matching is providing as a string. This is a equality match, if the URI of the request is not equal with the specified one, the request will not be handled.

If this is not desired, you can specify a regexp object (returned by the re.compile() call).

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_regexp.py
   :language: python

The above will match every URI starting with "/foo".

There's an additional way to extend this functionality. You can specify your own method which will receive the URI. All you need is to subclass from the URIPattern class and define the match() method which will get the uri as string and should return a boolean value.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_url_matcher.py
   :language: python

When doing http digest authentication, the client may send a request like this:

GET /dir/index.html HTTP/1.0
Host: localhost
Authorization: Digest username="Mufasa",
                    realm="testrealm@host.com",
                    nonce="dcd98b7102dd2f0e8b11d0f600bfb0c093",
                    uri="/dir/index.html",
                    qop=auth,
                    nc=00000001,
                    cnonce="0a4f113b",
                    response="6629fae49393a05397450978507c4ef1",
                    opaque="5ccc069c403ebaf9f0171e9517f40e41"

Implementing a matcher is difficult for this request as the order of the parameters in the Authorization header value is arbitrary.

By default, pytest-httpserver includes an Authorization header parser so the order of the parameters in the Authorization header does not matter.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_authorization_headers.py
   :language: python

Matching the request data can be done in two different ways. One way is to provide a python string (or bytes object) whose value will be compared to the request body.

When the request contains a json, matching to will be error prone as an object can be represented as json in different ways, for example when different length of indentation is used.

To match the body as json, you need to add the python data structure (which could be dict, list or anything which can be the result of json.loads() call). The request's body will be loaded as json and the result will be compared to the provided object. If the request's body cannot be loaded as json, the matcher will fail and pytest-httpserver will proceed with the next registered matcher.

Example:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_json_matcher.py
   :language: python

For each http header, you can specify a callable object (eg. a python function) which will be called with the header name, header actual value and the expected value, and will be able to determine the matching.

You need to implement such a function and then use it:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_case_insensitive_matcher.py
   :language: python

If you want to change the matching of only one header, you may want to use the HeaderValueMatcher class.

In case you want to do it globally, you can add the header name and the callable to the HeaderValueMatcher.DEFAULT_MATCHERS dict.

from pytest_httpserver import HeaderValueMatcher


def case_insensitive_compare(actual: str, expected: str) -> bool:
    return actual.lower() == expected.lower()


HeaderValueMatcher.DEFAULT_MATCHERS["X-Foo"] = case_insensitive_compare


def test_case_insensitive_matching(httpserver: HTTPServer):
    httpserver.expect_request("/", headers={"X-Foo": "bar"}).respond_with_data("OK")

    assert (
        requests.get(httpserver.url_for("/"), headers={"X-Foo": "bar"}).status_code
        == 200
    )
    assert (
        requests.get(httpserver.url_for("/"), headers={"X-Foo": "BAR"}).status_code
        == 200
    )

In case you don't want to change the defaults, you can provide the HeaderValueMatcher object itself.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_header_value_matcher.py
   :language: python

In the case the response is not static, for example it depends on the request, you can pass a function to the respond_with_handler function. This function will be called with a request object and it should return a Response object.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_custom_handler.py
   :language: python

The above code implements a handler which returns a random number between 1 and 10. Not particularly useful but shows that the handler can return any computed or derived value.

In the response handler you can also use the assert statement, similar to the tests, but there's a big difference. As the server is running in its own thread, this will cause a HTTP 500 error returned, and the exception registered into a list. To get that error, you need to call check_assertions() method of the httpserver.

In case you want to ensure that there was no other exception raised which was unhandled, you can call the check_handler_errors() method of the httpserver.

Two notable examples for this:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_check_handler_errors.py
   :language: python

If you want to call both methods (check_handler_errors() and check_assertions()) you can call the check() method, which will call these.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_check.py
   :language: python

By default, the server run by pytest-httpserver will listen on localhost on a random available port. In most cases it works well as you want to test your app in the local environment.

If you need to change this behavior, there are a plenty of options. It is very important to make these changes before starting the server, eg. before running any test using the httpserver fixture.

Use IP address 0.0.0.0 to listen globally.

Set PYTEST_HTTPSERVER_HOST and/or PYTEST_HTTPSERVER_PORT environment variables to the desired values.

Changing HTTPServer.DEFAULT_LISTEN_HOST and HTTPServer.DEFAULT_LISTEN_PORT attributes. Make sure that you do this before running any test requiring the httpserver fixture. One ideal place for this is putting it into conftest.py.

Overriding the httpserver_listen_address fixture. Similar to the solutions above, this needs to be done before starting the server (eg. before referencing the httpserver fixture).

import pytest


@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def httpserver_listen_address():
    return ("127.0.0.1", 8000)

When your client runs in a thread, everything completes without waiting for the first response. To overcome this problem, you can wait until all the handlers have been served or there's some error happened.

This is available only for oneshot and ordered handlers, as permanent handlers last forever.

To have this feature enabled, use the context object returned by the wait() method of the httpserver object.

This method accepts the following parameters:

• raise_assertions: whether raise assertions on unexpected request or timeout or not
• stop_on_nohandler: whether stop on unexpected request or not
• timeout: time (in seconds) until time is out

Behind the scenes it synchronizes the state of the server with the main thread.

Last, you need to assert on the result attribute of the context object.

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_wait_success.py
   :language: python

In the above code, all the request.get() calls could be in a different thread, eg. running in parallel, but the exit condition of the context object is to wait for the specified conditions.

If by any chance, you want to emulate network errors such as Connection reset by peer or Connection refused, you can simply do it by connecting to a random port number where no service is listening:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_howto_timeout_requests.py
   :language: python

However, connecting to the port where the httpserver had been started will still succeed as the server is running continuously. This is working by design as starting/stopping the server is costly.

import pytest
import requests


# setting a fixed port for httpserver
@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def httpserver_listen_address():
    return ("127.0.0.1", 8000)


# this test will pass
def test_normal_connection(httpserver):
    httpserver.expect_request("/foo").respond_with_data("foo")
    assert requests.get("http://localhost:8000/foo").text == "foo"


# this tess will FAIL, as httpserver started in test_normal_connection is
# still running
def test_connection_refused():
    with pytest.raises(requests.exceptions.ConnectionError):
        # this won't get Connection refused error as the server is still
        # running.
        # it will get HTTP status 500 as the handlers registered in
        # test_normal_connection have been removed
        requests.get("http://localhost:8000/foo")

To solve the issue, the httpserver can be stopped explicitly. It will start implicitly when the first test starts to use it. So the test_connection_refused test can be re-written to this:

def test_connection_refused(httpserver):
    httpserver.stop()  # stop the server explicitly
    with pytest.raises(requests.exceptions.ConnectionError):
        requests.get("http://localhost:8000/foo")

To emulate timeout, there's one way to register a handler function which will sleep for a given amount of time.

import time
from pytest_httpserver import HTTPServer
import pytest
import requests


def sleeping(request):
    time.sleep(2)  # this should be greater than the client's timeout parameter


def test_timeout(httpserver: HTTPServer):
    httpserver.expect_request("/baz").respond_with_handler(sleeping)
    with pytest.raises(requests.exceptions.ReadTimeout):
        assert requests.get(httpserver.url_for("/baz"), timeout=1)

There's one drawback though: the test takes 2 seconds to run as it waits the handler thread to be completed.

To run an https server, trustme can be used to do the heavy lifting:

@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def ca():
    return trustme.CA()


@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def httpserver_ssl_context(ca):
    context = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLS_SERVER)
    localhost_cert = ca.issue_cert("localhost")
    localhost_cert.configure_cert(context)
    return context


@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def httpclient_ssl_context(ca):
    with ca.cert_pem.tempfile() as ca_temp_path:
        return ssl.create_default_context(cafile=ca_temp_path)


@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_aiohttp(httpserver, httpclient_ssl_context):
    import aiohttp

    httpserver.expect_request("/").respond_with_data("hello world!")
    connector = aiohttp.TCPConnector(ssl=httpclient_ssl_context)
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession(connector=connector) as session:
        async with session.get(httpserver.url_for("/")) as result:
            assert (await result.text()) == "hello world!"


def test_requests(httpserver, ca):
    import requests

    httpserver.expect_request("/").respond_with_data("hello world!")
    with ca.cert_pem.tempfile() as ca_temp_path:
        result = requests.get(httpserver.url_for("/"), verify=ca_temp_path)
    assert result.text == "hello world!"


def test_httpx(httpserver, httpclient_ssl_context):
    import httpx

    httpserver.expect_request("/").respond_with_data("hello world!")
    result = httpx.get(httpserver.url_for("/"), verify=httpclient_ssl_context)
    assert result.text == "hello world!"

pytest-httpserver can only listen on one address and it also means that address family is determined by that. As it relies on Werkzeug, it passes the provided host parameter to it and then it is up to Werkzeug how the port binding is done.

Werkzeug determines the address family by examining the string provided. If it contains a colon (:) then it will be an IPv6 (AF_INET6) socket, otherwise, it will be an IPv4 (AF_INET) socket. The default string in pytest-httpserver is localhost so by default, the httpserver listens on IPv4. If you want it to listen on IPv6 address, provide an IPv6 address (::1 for example) to it.

It should be noted that dual-stack systems are still working with pytest-httpserver because the clients obtain the possible addresses for the a given name by calling getaddrinfo() or similar function which returns the addresses together with address families, and the client iterates over this list. In the case when pytest-httpserver is listening on 127.0.0.1, and the client uses localhost name in the url, it will try ::1 first, and then it will move on to 127.0.0.1, which will succeed, or vica-versa, where 127.0.0.1 will be successful first.

If you want to test a connection error case in your test (such as TLS error), the client can fail in a strange way as we seen in this issue. In such case, client tries with 127.0.0.1 first, then reaches a TLS error (which is normal as the test case is about testing for the TLS issue), then it moves on to ::1, then it fails with Connection reset. In such case fixing the bind address to 127.0.0.1 (and thereby fixing the host part of the URL returned by the url_for call) solves the issue as the client will receive the address (127.0.0.1) instead of the name (localhost) so it won't move on to the IPv6 address.

In this mode, the code which is being tested (the client) is executed in a background thread, while the server events are synchronized to the main thread, so it looks like it is running in the main thread. This allows to catch the assertions occured on the server side synchronously, and assertions are raised to the main thread. You need to call check_assertions at the end for only the unexpected requests.

This is an experimental feature so pytest-httpserver has no fixture for it yet. If you find this feature useful any you have ideas or suggestions related to this, feel free to open an issue.

Example:

.. literalinclude :: ../tests/examples/test_example_blocking_httpserver.py
   :language: python