How to stub an external API for testing

Question

I have a project that makes some calls to Twitter's API from the node.js server that I would like to test. However, I don't want to test the Twitter API (OAuth and the actual API I'm calling), so I thought it would be best to stub it out.

I found sinon.js that supports this supposedly. I have not found an example of how to do this and was wondering if this has been done before. And if so, seeing some sample code would really help.

Answer 1

What are you doing to call the API?

Imagine you use a method called api.call('url', function (error, response) {...}):

you can "fake" the callback with sinon, gently or whatever you like.

Example using gently:

gently.expect(api, 'call', function (url, callback) {
  assert.equal(url, 'http://api.twitter.com/...');
  callback(Error('Fake error'), null);
});