---
title: Getting started with webmock and rspec with Rails
slug: getting-started-with-webmock-and-rspec-with-rails
published_at: 2021-07-16 14:00:24 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:05 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, you&#39;ll learn how to use webmock to stub out HTTP requests to avoid traversing the network (slow!) in rspec tests. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [rails webmock, setting up rspec with webmock, webmock, webmock gem, rspec-rails and webmock, ruby on rails webmock, rspec rails webmock, stub http requests rspec, stub http requests]
views: 4367
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/getting-started-with-webmock-and-rspec-with-rails
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQjOB4sHXGQ
youtube_id: WQjOB4sHXGQ
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WQjOB4sHXGQ
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WQjOB4sHXGQ/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Getting started with webmock and rspec with Rails

*Published: July 16, 2021*
*Views: 4367*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQjOB4sHXGQ)

[![Getting started with webmock and rspec with Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WQjOB4sHXGQ/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQjOB4sHXGQ)

## Description

In this episode, you&#39;ll learn how to use webmock to stub out HTTP requests to avoid traversing the network (slow!) in rspec tests.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

hey welcome back to the testing series we&#39;re talking about rails testing we&#39;ve gone through the whole process of setting up rspec rails and factory bot and a few different tools and we&#39;ve gone through some basic model testing some basic job testing what i wanted to talk about today was making third-party api requests or api requests where you&#39;re writing like the raw html so in the previous episode we made a job test where we used stubbing to stub out a method on the stripe customer underlying client library and in this episode i wanted to talk about stubbing out the actual http request using a tool called webmock so the first thing we want to do with webmock is to install the gems we&#39;re going to open up our gem file head down to the test group only uh and we&#39;re gonna say webmock here and then the next thing we need to do is to go to our spec helper and say uh require webmock uh our spec i believe and we want to say bundle install okay now that we have webmock installed we can start playing around with our tests so if we go over to app jobs recall that we have a job here called update tickers job and this is using rest client to make a get http request out to this external url this is part of the sec.gov website it just returns a giant list of tickers so we can actually like take this head over to a new tab and say curl this thing and we&#39;ll pipe it into less and that will download the file and you can see that it&#39;s the name of the ticker so microsoft and then it&#39;s cik and that&#39;s all it is is a giant um i guess it&#39;s tab delimited file with ticker to cik mappings and so what we want to do is write a little test for this job so that we can ensure that it is performing as expected but we don&#39;t want to make an actual http request so let&#39;s go look at how we might do that so i&#39;m going to use rails g r spec install or model we want to create a new or no we want to create a new test for a job update tickers is the name of the job or it&#39;s like update ticker&#39;s job but we actually want to just say update tickers and then it will add on underscore job for us so i just say update tickers and then we&#39;re going to open up the spec here and we want to say like it um i don&#39;t know makes or it yeah fetches the uh tickers from the sec and we want to say update tickers job.perform now that&#39;s actually going to fire off the job and we&#39;ll start out with this exercise and see if we need to do any setup and add any assertions so let&#39;s run this test here and we are going to see it okay so now we see that the test failed and it says webbach net connection not allowed error real http connections are disabled unregistered connect are unregistered request a get request to this external third party with these headers etc etc etc and then it even gives you the code to stub it out so i&#39;m actually just going to copy this code and drop that in right above our test it came in a little weird we actually don&#39;t need any of these headers and i think that is all we really need is we want to step out the get request to that url and we expect it to return a 200 the body is actually going to be some other request body so what we might do is say that like body is equal to and then we can put in like a here doc um here that has like all of our things so msft and then um i forget it was like some some big value so let&#39;s let&#39;s actually just grab like the first few here and we&#39;ll drop those in so this is kind of what we expect to come back from the from the api and in fact i&#39;m just gonna have it return the first three results and we&#39;re going to stub that request and that&#39;s going to be our return value for our body and once we say perform now it should now the test should at least succeed because we are now stubbing out the request so i&#39;m going to run this again all right now we&#39;re seeing that null values in the column cik violates the non-null constraint so the cik in this case we&#39;re actually executing tickersick.find or create by ticker and sick and so it was not able to uh it was not able to figure out one of these for some reason so let&#39;s jump into our into that implementation for update here we go and then we will say ah so this is split on tab i wonder if these are actually tabs so this needs to be um tab so yeah i when i did a re-tab it switched those from tabs to spaces all right let&#39;s see if that works no it&#39;s still failing okay so in order to see how or why this test is failing i&#39;m going to drop in a debugger here i&#39;m going to say buy bug and that should break on execution so that we can see what&#39;s going on all right so now if we see mapping the first okay so yeah so we see there the mappings are not actually split into tuples of like microsoft comma the other thing because i think one of these pairs is not is not actually splitting on t or it&#39;s not seeing slash t so if we have um let&#39;s actually uh continue and let&#39;s make this an actual raw string where we will put in the um the real values so we&#39;ll say like this is uh slash t slash n and then i&#39;m just going to join this and manually write out the tabs in new lines so that our parsing works um okay and then that should be a quote sometimes getting the body like the format of the body right can be a little tricky so now when we look at mapping it&#39;s now broken out correctly into the ticker and then it&#39;s cik so this should succeed fine okay great so now now we&#39;re no longer seeing any failures um and we assume that this is like it should uh work with stubbed body right and then what we want to do is we we also want to ensure that it&#39;s actually creating these ticker sick things and so um if we look at the actual job here right what it&#39;s doing is it&#39;s iterating over all of the mappings that i got back between the ticker symbol and the cik and then it&#39;s trying to find or create the ticker sick combination given the ticker and the sick and again i don&#39;t know if i&#39;m saying that right cik but whatever and so what we want to do is we want to make some assertions that like this is actually either finding or creating and so given three different ticker and sick combinations i think what we might want to do is before we run the job this is going to be again part of setup is we can create a ticker and sick combo that matches the above and then we will run our job and assert that three more or that two more ticker sticks were created and one was like actually found so let&#39;s say uh ticker sick is create ticker sick with uh ticker being microsoft and the cik being the one that it had there so this number um so that should create one that will already be in the database before we perform and that should be found with our finder create and then when we run this we want to expect that running this job to change we want it we wanted to change the result of another block where we&#39;re going to say ticker sick dot count dot buy two so we wanted to change the total count of ticker six by two so it should actually just create two of them instead of creating three so we&#39;re returning um we&#39;re returning three different ticker sticks in our s in our like w body for the stub request response and we are then putting one in the database and asserting that two were created so that&#39;s like one way to make sure that this is actually happening so let&#39;s see if we can run this job okay the factory is not registered we need to create the factory so rails g r spec model ticker sick that should create both the uh the spec file and the factory for us so it created the factory for ticker six it&#39;s great now we can run it again and see if this works success okay so let&#39;s comment this bit out and make sure that it&#39;s still working or that it fails we want it to fail right okay so now it said ticker stick.count should have changed by two but it was changed by zero because nothing is actually being created so that&#39;s how we can assert that it is actually being created now another thing that we might want to do is make sure that we have now a total of expect like ticker sick dot count dot two equal three after we&#39;ve run this because we wanted to create one here and then we wanted to create two more and then we might even expect ticker sick dot find by ticker of amzn dot um cik dot two equal what came back so this is like a way to make assertions on both amazon and google to make sure that we are parsing and creating the correct ticker stick mappings so now if we run this again um it is succeeding and if we were to comment out like or make maybe add something like blah to the sick before it&#39;s added to the database that should help um our test fail and the uh ah right so then this is also now gonna fail law so sometimes making the test fail is like a little trickier than making it past um okay so anyways this should be this should be working successfully now and um that is one of the ways that you can use webmock so here we the very first thing we did was we tried to make an http request after installing or okay so the very first thing we did was install webmock and then when we tried to make an http get request to this url webmock failed because it didn&#39;t want to allow us to make http requests that is like a safety feature we don&#39;t actually want to hit live http endpoints as part of tests most of the time because networks can be non-deterministic sometimes they&#39;re up sometimes they&#39;re down it depends on where the tests are running sometimes api endpoints change so we don&#39;t actually want to hit the endpoint instead we want to mock out the endpoint and make assertions about what we know to be true as long as we&#39;re getting back the body that is deterministic and expected so we kind of like stub out the we step out the request and we give it a specific body that we know we&#39;re going to get back and then we make assertions about what would happen if we got that body back from the response we could also do other things like what if it got what if what if um our endpoint got a 300 did the you know did the error handling work as expected or if it got a 400 or 500 etc but this should get you started with webmock it&#39;s another tool that you can use there is yet another tool called vcr that&#39;s another gem that you can use for sort of recording the outbound requests and then replaying them that can be really handy if you&#39;re working with more complex sort of um request or response bodies that you need to have like much more detail in the response body uh rather than just being able to sort of like hard code and write out the the response body manually like this you might want to use vcr all right so that wraps up how we&#39;re going to use webmock as part of our r spec tool suite thanks so much for watching and we&#39;ll see in the next one

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