Testing a controller that makes outside api calls

[crispinb]

@dimitarvp

To alleviate the risk of falling into the trap of wishful thinking that mocking incurs, just use curl (or Postman, Insomnia etc.) to download responses from the actual live API, save them on your machine and then make text fixtures out of them.

Excellent advice. This also encourages you to keep your mocks thin, and makes use of the API data easy to expand as needs dictate. Maybe this is just me, but I have a tendency to pluck the few values from the API return I think I need for my model, only to find later there’s gold there that I missed. With raw api returns available locally, everything’s always there to be mined later.