Testing third party modules with Mox

You could always add your own Redis behaviour and then have Redix simply be one possible implementation of it. IE, mock MyApp.Redis`` instead of mocking Redix`. That’s what I’ve done for stuff at least.

In my opinion, mocking should never ever be done, instead anything that might be mocked should instead be passed into the modules and functions that use it, that way at test time you can pass in something different, this way you retain full async and no surprises about where things come from (plus you might find later that you suddenly need different implementations of something!).

But passing something in at test time, isn’t that what would make it a Mock/Stub?
And passing it it, could happen with several strategies. Could be a parameter on the function, could be set by config, … It depends on the use case what would be the best strategy, but in both cases Mox is a nice helper, in my opinion. It saves some boilerplate code.

We also create our own behaviour mostly MyApp.Redix and then create a wrapper, MyApp.Redix.Wrapper which implement the functions typically as oneliners.

Not necessarily, passing things in mean it is pluggable, meaning you can easily change the implementation later if you need to as wlel.

great approach, maybe you can link to an example of this for people to refer to.

I’d also suggest that you can use mix environments to load the different behaviours in each environment, nicely captured here Mocks and explicit contracts « Plataformatec Blog

Thanks for all the great responses folks!