Starting and stopping

the TCP port is TBD.

Configuring

By configuring the server means registering handlers for specific requests. Once a request matches

with the configuration the specified response handler is fired and the reponse is served.

Requests

When registering a :py:class:`pytest_httpserver.server.RequestMatcher`, it can use various parts

of the HTTP request to be matched: URI, method, data, headers, and query string can be specified.

All of these are based on simple qeuality checking, with the exception of method and URI where a special

value specifying `any` can be given (variables `URI_DEFAULT` and `METHOD_ALL`, respectively).

:py:class:`pytest_httpserver.server.HTTPServer` also determines how these matchers are looked up and

what their lifetime is. You can register handlers which handle any amount of requests, but you can also

register one-shot handlers which only handle one request and then they disappear.

Also, there's ordered handlers which also specify the order of the requests to be handled. Not matching

the order of their registration, the server will refuse to serve any further requests.

With all of these, you can create a server with very permissive to very strict request handling.

Responses

Once the request is matched with one of the matchers, the handler gets fired, which can return a static

response or you can create a function which can return a dynamic response.

When dealing with static responses you can determine all parts of the http response (status, headers,

content, etc), and you can also specify a JSON-serializable object to be returned as a json.

Debugging errors while testing

When the tests are running against the server and no matcher can be found for the given request, the server

replies with HTTP status 500, and a short error text. This is not very helpful in most cases so if you want

to check what is the situation, you should call :py:meth:`pytest_httpserver.HTTPServer.format_matchers` or

:py:meth:`pytest_httpserver.HTTPServer.check_assertions` methods. The first one returns a human-readable

string representation of the matchers registered. The second one raises `AssertionError` with the errors

happened during the testing in the server.

Also there's a :py:attr:`pytest_httpserver.HTTPServer.log` attribute which contains the request-reponse

object pairs what the server handled.