stephanos

stephanos

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share rewire with you, a dependency injection library I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. It aims to keep your production code free from testing concerns, works with async tests and any mock.


Example

Given a module such as this:

# this module has a hard-wired dependency on the `English` module
defmodule Conversation do
  def start(), do: English.greet()
end

If you define a mox mock EnglishMock you can rewire the dependency in your unit test:

defmodule MyTest do
  use ExUnit.Case
  use Rewire                                     # (1) activate `rewire`
  import Mox

  rewire Conversation, English: EnglishMock      # (2) rewire `English` to `EnglishMock`

  test "start/0" do
    stub(EnglishMock, :greet, fn -> "g'day" end)
    assert Conversation.start() == "g'day"       # (3) test using the mock
  end
end

Check out all the details at:
https://github.com/stephanos/rewire

And let me know what you think!

Showing Posts 1 to 8

hauleth

hauleth

Looks nice except one thing - why use use instead just plain import? It should work without problems.

marcin

marcin

That’s cool! I’ve been struggling in how to organise a callback mechanism (eg. after creating the record send an email and also generate a receipt), but keep it decoupled enough to be able to test well.
Rewire could help here! Will check it out.

edisonywh

edisonywh

Very interesting. Since it works by aliasing, does that mean it can only be used for unit testing the module directly? For example, if I have a module called Discord, and Discord calls Conversation.start/0, there’s no way to rewire the English reference, is that right?

hauleth

hauleth

From what I see in the code - yes, it works only for modules called directly.

stephanos

stephanos OP

you’re absolutely right! I originally had some compiler hooks in there to update the module attributes but never went back to require after I realized I didn’t need that.

Just updated the docs and shipped a new version to reflect that.

stephanos

stephanos OP

actually, you could stack them:

rewire Conversation, English: EnglishMock
rewire Discord, Conversation: Conversation

You can find a working test case here: rewire/test/rewire_alias_test.exs at master · stephanos/rewire · GitHub

But I’m not sure whether that’s a good testing etiquette. Reaching deeply into module’s might be a smell, depending on the use case.

ruhshan

ruhshan

Hi, very cool!

Is there any way to use it with like… where I declare dependency using compile_env

For example:

@queue Application.compile_env(
          :task_processor,
          :events_queue
        )

def enqueue_create_event(event_id) when is_integer(event_id) and event_id > 0 do
    @queue.enqueue_create_event(event_id)
  end

hauleth

hauleth

It should work just fine if you will mock module that is defined as comp-time config.

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