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How to Mock a Web Server in Your Java Applications

When you need to test an application that consumes a web API, you basically have two options:

  1. Use Testcontainers to start a container that will run the web API which your application will consume.
  2. Mock a Web Server to emulate the web API which your application will consume.

Many times, starting a container for that is not an option. For instance: you might not have a container environment available, or you just don’t have the artifacts to create that container (it might be a 3rd part API), or it is hard to emulate the needed behavior with containers.

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Use Mocks in Testing? Choose the Lesser Evil!

Mocking Test Methodology 

The key idea of mocking is to replace real code (e.g. calls to a database or service) with artificial functionality that has the same return type. There are different approaches to this practice. Here, I explain best practices and why it might be better to avoid mocking to have real code quality.

User Service — Example to Be Tested With Mocks

Let's write a simple application that fetches users from HTTP service.