--- title: Rspec request specs for an API Controller with Rails slug: rspec-request-specs-for-an-api-controller-with-rails published_at: 2021-07-21 14:00:06 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:03 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn a little about setting up a request spec with Rspec to test an API controller in a Ruby on Rails application #rails #rubyonrails tags: [request specs for an API controller with Rails, Ruby on Rails tutorial, rspec, beginner, how to make a request spec for an API controller with rails, rspec request specs, rspec request] views: 10957 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/rspec-request-specs-for-an-api-controller-with-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dz2w0bIGE youtube_id: I9dz2w0bIGE embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/I9dz2w0bIGE thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9dz2w0bIGE/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Rspec request specs for an API Controller with Rails *Published: July 21, 2021* *Views: 10957* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dz2w0bIGE) [![Rspec request specs for an API Controller with Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9dz2w0bIGE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dz2w0bIGE) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn a little about setting up a request spec with Rspec to test an API controller in a Ruby on Rails application #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey welcome back we are continuing our series about testing with rails in this episode we're going to talk about testing an api endpoint uh using a request spec which is sort of a simple way to test a test a rails api endpoint and so the first thing we're going to do is say rails g r spec request um and then we want to give it the route that we want to test for so in this case it's going to be api prices and so if we go back to the the ui here for a second on our company show page we have this chart this graph and it's using data from two different api endpoints one is slash prices and that's what gives us this price data and allows us to sort of like create this line chart with different prices and then the second one is we have a different api endpoint that gives us the data about these flags which tells us is it a buy or sell the name of the person maybe their title or whatever and so if we open up the uh the network tab and just inspect this and do a refresh here we'll be able to take a look at the api calls that are happening under the hood so we see this first one is to slash api prices and it takes in a query string parameter with a company id and it gives back a json object where the keys are dates and the values are the prices on those dates so this is kind of the this is this the thing that we want to test with our controller or with our request spec here so i'm going to open up the request spec and then i'm also going to open up the api prices controller so we have this api prices controller it's namespaced under the api module and the thing that we're actually testing here is the price the prices controller sort of but it is a a request spec all right so now what we're going to do is we want to describe api prices and we want to make sure that it actually works and so the very first thing it's doing is it's making a get request to api price's index path now this api prices index path has to be a helper method that actually exists so if we were to run this now that that method does not exist because that's not the name of that index route and so it says undefined local variable or method api indexes path and so what we can do is we can say rails routes and that will give us the giant list of all the routes that are part of our application and what we could do is we could like sort of dig through here and try to find oh there it is api prices um i typically will just get grep for this but if you have a small enough number of routes you might be able to just jump right to it and so this this value that's on the left hand side gives you the name like the base name for the route and then you can append uh underscore path or underscore url to get like either just the the relative you are the relative path so slash api slash prices slash whatever or you can say uh underscore url to get the fully qualified url given the domain that's part of your mailer settings so now if i go back into our um our spec here so api prices spec and i want to change this to just api prices so we want to make a get request to api slash prices and have it return the actual price data and uh sorry that should be path api prices path we wanted to get give us back the price data for a given company now it says couldn't find a company without an id that's because in our api prices controller this the first thing it does is it tries to find a company by company id which is passed in in the query param so we actually need to pass a company id here with the company id with the id of an actual company so let's create company equals create company again we're using factory bot we have another episode about how to set up factory bot and use that so we're going to pass in the id of a company using arguments to that uh api prices method uh path method and it says that it works so at least we're getting back uh a two 200 status code so let's add another test here returns the prices for a company do and um and then we want to again uh create we want to create the company and let's actually see what this is doing so api prices controller so this is just returning the json for a company's underlying prices if we look at a company um there's nothing special here so prices is just a json field in the database that's holding some price data so let's actually create our company with some dummy price data so we'll just say prices is this thing where the key is twenty twenty one a one a one and the value is a price a hundred dollars and then a one o two and then we'll make it i don't know 110 dollars the next day and we'll set we'll pass this as the prices when we're creating the company prices is prices and then what we should do is we want to expect that the response dot body um to equal prices i believe so let's see we might need to parse it out too okay yep so the the response body was like json as a string so we want to say maybe like json.parse the response body that should equal prices okay expected this with symbols but we got that ah that's because here these are going to be strings not symbols so let's run this again okay so now it is actually giving us back what we expect um so what again what we're doing here is we're making a get request to that path so we could we could i believe we could just as easily say something like get slash api prices company id is equal to and then put in our company.id there and that should give us back the same thing so that's kind of what that line is doing is just formulating the url to which it's going to send a get request and then we can make assertions based on this response you can head over to the r-spec docs and look at all the different things that you can that you can make assertions on the most common that i have found that i use is the http status and the body sometimes i'll also check the headers of the response if i'm using those to make some decisions or use those for any sort of logic but this was a pretty simple example because we're just sort of passing through the price data so let's see if we have any other any other controllers in our api namespace that are interesting so we also have this flags controller this one's a little more interesting because it's going to iterate over some related form fours and then sort of build up some flags so let's add a test for this one also so i'm going to say rails g r spec request this one is going to be for flags api flags we'll open this up and this endpoint is again going to be i think api flags path i don't know if this accepts any arguments so flags controller uh yes again company id so we're going to need to create a company it's equal to create company company id is company dot id okay and all right so if we were to comment out this method too let's just make sure that just as a sanity check this would fail because that method didn't exist all right good so that does that does work all right so now let's write a method here for um it like structures the flags as expected okay so this one is going to be a little bit more involved because we need to create a form four or at least one form for that's related to that company and then make assertions based on like the shape of the flags that are coming back so we need to create some form for so first we'll create our company um and ultimately we're going to make this request down here and the the flags are going to be json.parse of response dot body and then we'll make assertions on the flags so expect flags dot count dot two equal to all right then we need to actually create some form four so form four is uh create form for where the company is company and uh i guess it's going to need it's going to populate the file date the related insider's name if it's a director owner other uh okay so then let's also put in like the sum shares and we'll just make assertions about that some shares you probably want to go through and check that the title is correct and all these other things but just for demonstration we'll say that the the total shares is uh one thousand and um let's say some shares after is uh ten thousand okay so that should be that should give us one form four and two form fours and we also probably need a filing date file date is and i can't remember if this is actually date.new 2021 0 or like 1 1. or i can't remember if it's a if it's actually a date or if it's a like a string value or something but we'll just we'll just give it two flags one on two different days and then we'll we'll make the some shares on the second flag two thousand and twenty thousand for each for the same company but when we create the form four the underlying factory should create a second insider as part of its association so it should have different insiders but in reality we really just want to care or we want we're most curious about having that flag response have multiple flags in it so if we run this again um let's see so first we'll comment out this whole thing too and we'll run the entire test okay it failed missing a template okay if we come over here now it's going to render the json template flags is equal to empty array now we should get at least the first test passing again just returning with a empty response so it works is returning and passing successfully and then structures the flags as expected is failing because we got zero in the response because we had an empty array here all right let's comment these all back in and rerun our test all right so now it's at least returning the right number of flags so now we can say something like um flag one is flags uh at zero flags dot first and then we can say expect flag one dot file date dot two equal and then uh 20 21 a 101. ah right because this is going to be just a json object we should be using this syntax to reach into that flag and pull out the file date okay cool so now we are still returning the file date if we were to comment out the file date over there this should fail and we'll know that we are at least getting the file date back okay that's cool um we can also maybe do like some shares just to just to make sure some shares and this should be a thousand let's run this again and we got back a thousand we can comment it out to just confirm all right and that confirms that it is working as expected so now this test is uh you know we're creating a little bit of a little bit of data up front so this is sort of the setup right so we create the company in two form fours that's the setup and then we make our request to get the flags and we that so that's sort of our exercise and then we have all of our assertions at the end so that's sort of like uh yeah our list of assertions um we're not doing any cleanup technically you could do like a fourth piece of each test which is a cleanup step where you're kind of like deleting things from the database and and cleaning up after yourself but for now this is this is a really solid way to get started with request backs for an api endpoint or like an api request spec so hopefully that is useful and helpful and yeah if you enjoyed this i would appreciate a like otherwise we'll see in the next one [Music] cheers --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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