The very very short version is: webmockr helps you stub HTTP requests so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

More details

You tell webmockr what HTTP request you want to match against and if it sees a request matching your criteria it doesn’t actually do the HTTP request. Instead, it gives back the same object you would have gotten back with a real request, but only with the bits it knows about. For example, we can’t give back the actual data you’d get from a real HTTP request as the request wasn’t performed.

In addition, if you set an expectation of what webmockr should return, we return that. For example, if you expect a request to return a 418 error (I’m a Teapot), then that’s what you’ll get.

What you can match against

• HTTP method (required)

Plus any single or combination of the following:

• URI
  • Right now, we can match directly against URI’s, and with regex URI patterns. Eventually, we will support RFC 6570 URI templates.
  • We normalize URI paths so that URL encoded things match URL un-encoded things (e.g. hello world to hello%20world)
• Query parameters
  • We normalize query parameter values so that URL encoded things match URL un-encoded things (e.g. message = hello world to message = hello%20world)
• Request headers
  • We normalize headers and treat all forms of same headers as equal. For example, the following two sets of headers are equal:
    • list(H1 = "value1", content_length = 123, X_CuStOm_hEAder = "foo")
    • list(h1 = "value1", "Content-Length" = 123, "x-cuSTOM-HeAder" = "foo")
• Request body

Real HTTP requests

There’s a few scenarios to think about when using webmockr:

After doing

library(webmockr)

webmockr is loaded but not turned on. At this point webmockr doesn’t change anythning.

Once you turn on webmockr like

webmockr::enable()

webmockr will now by default not allow real HTTP requests from the http libraries that adapters are loaded for (right now only crul).

You can optionally allow real requests via webmockr_allow_net_connect(), and disallow real requests via webmockr_disable_net_connect(). You can check whether you are allowing real requests with webmockr_net_connect_allowed().

Certain kinds of real HTTP requests allowed: We don’t suppoprt this yet, but you can allow localhost HTTP requests with the allow_localhost parameter in the webmockr_configure() function.

Storing actual HTTP responses

webmockr doesn’t do that. Check out vcr