How to unit test Google Cloud Endpoints

I tried everything I could think of to allow these to be tested in the normal way. I tried hitting the /_ah/spi methods directly as well as even trying to create a new protorpc app using service_mappings to no avail. I’m not a Googler on the endpoints team so maybe they have something clever to allow this to work but it doesn’t appear that simply using webtest will work (unless I missed something obvious).

In the meantime you can write a test script that starts the app engine test server with an isolated environment and just issue http requests to it.

Example to run the server with an isolated environment (bash but you can easily run this from python):

DATA_PATH=/tmp/appengine_data

if [ ! -d "$DATA_PATH" ]; then
    mkdir -p $DATA_PATH
fi

dev_appserver.py --storage_path=$DATA_PATH/storage --blobstore_path=$DATA_PATH/blobstore --datastore_path=$DATA_PATH/datastore --search_indexes_path=$DATA_PATH/searchindexes --show_mail_body=yes --clear_search_indexes --clear_datastore .

You can then just use requests to test ala curl:

requests.get('http://localhost:8080/_ah/...')

If you don’t want to test the full HTTP stack as described by Ezequiel Muns, you can also just mock out endpoints.method and test your API definition directly:

def null_decorator(*args, **kwargs):
    def decorator(method):
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            return method(*args, **kwargs)
        return wrapper
    return decorator

from google.appengine.api.users import User
import endpoints
endpoints.method = null_decorator
# decorator needs to be mocked out before you load you endpoint api definitions
from mymodule import api


class FooTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.api = api.FooService()

    def test_bar(self):
        # pass protorpc messages directly
        self.api.foo_bar(api.MyRequestMessage(some='field'))

webtest can be simplified to reduce naming bugs

for the following TestApi

import endpoints
import protorpc
import logging

class ResponseMessageClass(protorpc.messages.Message):
    message = protorpc.messages.StringField(1)
class RequestMessageClass(protorpc.messages.Message):
    message = protorpc.messages.StringField(1)


@endpoints.api(name='testApi',version='v1',
               description='Test API',
               allowed_client_ids=[endpoints.API_EXPLORER_CLIENT_ID])
class TestApi(protorpc.remote.Service):

    @endpoints.method(RequestMessageClass,
                      ResponseMessageClass,
                      name='test',
                      path='test',
                      http_method='POST')
    def test(self, request):
        logging.info(request.message)
        return ResponseMessageClass(message="response message")

the tests.py should look like this

import webtest
import logging
import unittest
from google.appengine.ext import testbed
from protorpc.remote import protojson
import endpoints

from api.test_api import TestApi, RequestMessageClass, ResponseMessageClass


class AppTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

        tb = testbed.Testbed()
        tb.setup_env(current_version_id='testbed.version') 
        tb.activate()
        tb.init_all_stubs()
        self.testbed = tb


    def tearDown(self):
        self.testbed.deactivate()


    def test_endpoint_testApi(self):
        application = endpoints.api_server([TestApi], restricted=False)

        testapp = webtest.TestApp(application)

        req = RequestMessageClass(message="request message")

        response = testapp.post('/_ah/spi/' + TestApi.__name__ + '.' + TestApi.test.__name__, protojson.encode_message(req),content_type='application/json')

        res = protojson.decode_message(ResponseMessageClass,response.body)

        self.assertEqual(res.message, 'response message')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

My solution uses one dev_appserver instance for the entire test module, which is faster than restarting the dev_appserver for each test method.

By using Google’s Python API client library, I also get the simplest and at the same time most powerful way of interacting with my API.

import unittest
import sys
import os

from apiclient.discovery import build
import dev_appserver


sys.path[1:1] = dev_appserver.EXTRA_PATHS

from google.appengine.tools.devappserver2 import devappserver2
from google.appengine.tools.devappserver2 import python_runtime

server = None


def setUpModule():
    # starting a dev_appserver instance for testing
    path_to_app_yaml = os.path.normpath('path_to_app_yaml')
    app_configs = [path_to_app_yaml]
    python_runtime._RUNTIME_ARGS = [
        sys.executable,
        os.path.join(os.path.dirname(dev_appserver.__file__),         
        '_python_runtime.py')
        ]
    options = devappserver2.PARSER.parse_args(['--port', '8080',
                                           '--datastore_path', ':memory:',
                                           '--logs_path', ':memory:',
                                           '--skip_sdk_update_check',
                                           '--',
                                           ] + app_configs)
    global server
    server = devappserver2.DevelopmentServer()
    server.start(options)


def tearDownModule():
    # shutting down dev_appserver instance after testing
    server.stop()


class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):
    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        # build a service object for interacting with the api
        # dev_appserver must be running and listening on port 8080
        api_root = 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/_ah/api'
        api = 'my_api'
        version = 'v0.1'
        discovery_url = '%s/discovery/v1/apis/%s/%s/rest' % (api_root, api,                     
                                                             version)
        cls.service = build(api, version, discoveryServiceUrl=discovery_url)

    def setUp(self):
        # create a parent entity and store its key for each test run
        body = {'name': 'test  parent'}
        response = self.service.parent().post(body=body).execute()   
        self.parent_key = response['parent_key']

    def test_post(self):
        # test my post method 
        # the tested method also requires a path argument "parent_key" 
        # .../_ah/api/my_api/sub_api/post/{parent_key}
        body = {'SomeProjectEntity': {'SomeId': 'abcdefgh'}}
        parent_key = self.parent_key
        req = self.service.sub_api().post(body=body,parent_key=parent_key)
        response = req.execute()
        etc..

After digging through the sources, I believe things have changed in endpoints since Ezequiel Muns’s (excellent) answer in 2014. For method 1 you now need to request from /_ah/api/* directly and use the correct HTTP method instead of using the /_ah/spi/* transformation. This makes the test file look like this:

from google.appengine.ext import testbed
import webtest
# ...
def setUp(self):
    tb = testbed.Testbed()
    # Setting current_version_id doesn't seem necessary anymore
    tb.activate()
    tb.init_all_stubs()
    self.testbed = tb

def tearDown(self):
    self.testbed.deactivate()

def test_endpoint_insert(self):
    app = endpoints.api_server([TestEndpoint]) # restricted is no longer required
    testapp = webtest.TestApp(app)
    msg = {...} # a dict representing the message object expected by insert
                # To be serialised to JSON by webtest
    resp = testapp.post_json('/_ah/api/test/v1/insert', msg)

    self.assertEqual(resp.json, {'expected': 'json response msg as dict'})

For searching’s sake, the symptom of using the old method is endpoints raising a ValueError with Invalid request path: /_ah/spi/whatever. Hope that saves someone some time!