How can I mock requests and the response?

This is how you can do it (you can run this file as-is):

import requests
import unittest
from unittest import mock

# This is the class we want to test
class MyGreatClass:
    def fetch_json(self, url):
        response = requests.get(url)
        return response.json()

# This method will be used by the mock to replace requests.get
def mocked_requests_get(*args, **kwargs):
    class MockResponse:
        def __init__(self, json_data, status_code):
            self.json_data = json_data
            self.status_code = status_code

        def json(self):
            return self.json_data

    if args[0] == 'http://someurl.com/test.json':
        return MockResponse({"key1": "value1"}, 200)
    elif args[0] == 'http://someotherurl.com/anothertest.json':
        return MockResponse({"key2": "value2"}, 200)

    return MockResponse(None, 404)

# Our test case class
class MyGreatClassTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    # We patch 'requests.get' with our own method. The mock object is passed in to our test case method.
    @mock.patch('requests.get', side_effect=mocked_requests_get)
    def test_fetch(self, mock_get):
        # Assert requests.get calls
        mgc = MyGreatClass()
        json_data = mgc.fetch_json('http://someurl.com/test.json')
        self.assertEqual(json_data, {"key1": "value1"})
        json_data = mgc.fetch_json('http://someotherurl.com/anothertest.json')
        self.assertEqual(json_data, {"key2": "value2"})
        json_data = mgc.fetch_json('http://nonexistenturl.com/cantfindme.json')
        self.assertIsNone(json_data)

        # We can even assert that our mocked method was called with the right parameters
        self.assertIn(mock.call('http://someurl.com/test.json'), mock_get.call_args_list)
        self.assertIn(mock.call('http://someotherurl.com/anothertest.json'), mock_get.call_args_list)

        self.assertEqual(len(mock_get.call_args_list), 3)

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

Important Note: If your MyGreatClass class lives in a different package, say my.great.package, you have to mock my.great.package.requests.get instead of just 'request.get'. In that case your test case would look like this:

import unittest
from unittest import mock
from my.great.package import MyGreatClass

# This method will be used by the mock to replace requests.get
def mocked_requests_get(*args, **kwargs):
    # Same as above


class MyGreatClassTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    # Now we must patch 'my.great.package.requests.get'
    @mock.patch('my.great.package.requests.get', side_effect=mocked_requests_get)
    def test_fetch(self, mock_get):
        # Same as above

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

Enjoy!


Here is what worked for me:

import mock
@mock.patch('requests.get', mock.Mock(side_effect = lambda k:{'aurl': 'a response', 'burl' : 'b response'}.get(k, 'unhandled request %s'%k)))

Try using the responses library. Here is an example from their documentation:

import responses
import requests

@responses.activate
def test_simple():
    responses.add(responses.GET, 'http://twitter.com/api/1/foobar',
                  json={'error': 'not found'}, status=404)

    resp = requests.get('http://twitter.com/api/1/foobar')

    assert resp.json() == {"error": "not found"}

    assert len(responses.calls) == 1
    assert responses.calls[0].request.url == 'http://twitter.com/api/1/foobar'
    assert responses.calls[0].response.text == '{"error": "not found"}'

It provides quite a nice convenience over setting up all the mocking yourself.

There's also HTTPretty:

It's not specific to requests library, more powerful in some ways though I found it doesn't lend itself so well to inspecting the requests that it intercepted, which responses does quite easily

There's also httmock.

A new library gaining popularity recently over the venerable requests is httpx, which adds first-class support for async. A mocking library for httpx is: https://github.com/lundberg/respx