In ropenscilabs/vcr: Record 'HTTP' Calls to Disk

library("vcr")

In tests

In your tests, for whichever tests you want to use vcr, wrap them in a vcr::use_cassette() call like:

library(testthat)
vcr::use_cassette("rl_citation", {
  test_that("my test", {
    aa <- rl_citation()

    expect_is(aa, "character")
    expect_match(aa, "IUCN")
    expect_match(aa, "www.iucnredlist.org")
  })
})

OR put the vcr::use_cassette() block on the inside, but put testthat expectations outside of the vcr::use_cassette() block:

library(testthat)
test_that("my test", {
  vcr::use_cassette("rl_citation", {
    aa <- rl_citation()
  })

  expect_is(aa, "character")
  expect_match(aa, "IUCN")
  expect_match(aa, "www.iucnredlist.org")
})

Don't wrap the use_cassette() block inside your test_that() block with testthat expectations inside the use_cassette() block, as you'll only get the line number that the use_cassette() block starts on on failures.

The first time you run the tests, a "cassette" i.e. a file with recorded HTTP interactions, is created at tests/fixtures/rl_citation.yml. The times after that, the cassette will be used. If you change your code and more HTTP interactions are needed in the code wrapped by vcr::use_cassette("rl_citation", delete tests/fixtures/rl_citation.yml and run the tests again for re-recording the cassette.

Outside of tests

If you want to get a feel for how vcr works, although you don't need too.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(require(vcr, quietly = TRUE))
unlink(file.path(cassette_path(), "helloworld.yml"))
vcr_configure(dir = tempdir())

library(vcr)
library(crul)

cli <- crul::HttpClient$new(url = "https://eu.httpbin.org")
system.time(
  use_cassette(name = "helloworld", {
    cli$get("get")
  })
)

The request gets recorded, and all subsequent requests of the same form used the cached HTTP response, and so are much faster

system.time(
  use_cassette(name = "helloworld", {
    cli$get("get")
  })
)

unlink(file.path(cassette_path(), "helloworld.yml"))

Importantly, your unit test deals with the same inputs and the same outputs - but behind the scenes you use a cached HTTP response - thus, your tests run faster.

The cached response looks something like (condensed for brevity):

http_interactions:
- request:
    method: get
    uri: https://eu.httpbin.org/get
    body:
      encoding: ''
      string: ''
    headers:
      User-Agent: libcurl/7.54.0 r-curl/3.2 crul/0.5.2
  response:
    status:
      status_code: '200'
      message: OK
      explanation: Request fulfilled, document follows
    headers:
      status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      connection: keep-alive
    body:
      encoding: UTF-8
      string: "{\n  \"args\": {}, \n  \"headers\": {\n    \"Accept\": \"application/json,
        text/xml, application/xml, */*\", \n    \"Accept-Encoding\": \"gzip, deflate\",
        \n    \"Connection\": \"close\", \n    \"Host\": \"httpbin.org\", \n    \"User-Agent\":
        \"libcurl/7.54.0 r-curl/3.2 crul/0.5.2\"\n  }, \n  \"origin\": \"111.222.333.444\",
        \n  \"url\": \"https://eu.httpbin.org/get\"\n}\n"
  recorded_at: 2018-04-03 22:55:02 GMT
  recorded_with: vcr/0.1.0, webmockr/0.2.4, crul/0.5.2

All components of both the request and response are preserved, so that the HTTP client (in this case crul) can reconstruct its own response just as it would if it wasn't using vcr.

Less basic usage

For tweaking things to your needs, make sure to read the docs about configuration (e.g., where are the fixtures saved? can they be re-recorded automatically regulary?) and request matching (how does vcr match a request to a recorded interaction?)

ropenscilabs/vcr documentation built on Feb. 5, 2024, 5:58 p.m.