Testing a (Perl) Web application without a lot of setup

In this posting I take break from the testing PHP session as I had some urgent work to do on a web application I have written 4 years ago.

In this article I explain how to setup a small stand-alone web server written in Perl to test a web application.

I am also busy writing the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats

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Testing a Web application without a lot of setup

I wrote CPAN::Forum a web forum more than 4 years ago and have not worked on it for a long time.

Recently a bunch of spammers decided to post their stupid ads and the forum does not have a way to fight it. So after long period of not touching the code this will be a good reason to start working on it again. At a minimum I'll have to add a way to remove posts using the web interface and then give such right to some of the users.

Unfortunately the test suite is broken and probably covers only a small fraction of the code. I know this for sure. The TODO file had "Write Tests" three times on the top row.

So first, before I can work on the new feature I have to add a reasonable test suite. As I don't want to configure Apache every time the tests run I wanted to have a way to run them in stand-alone mode.

Here is where HTTP::Server::Simple comes in the picture.

Using HTTP::Server::Simple for test setup

Simple web server

Just in a few lines it allows me to write a simple web server:

I need two things. One of them is a module that I called MyServer.pm which is a subclass of HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI and contains the following code:

    package MyServer;

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use base qw(HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

    sub handle_request {
        my ($self, $cgi) = @_;

        print "Hello World";

        return;
    }

    1;

The handle_request method is the actual implementation of my "application". It has access to the CGI.pm object and whatever it prints to STDOUT will go back to your browser.

Theoretically you should send both the HTTP response and the HTTP headers but for simple cases such as above it will work without anything.

The second thing needed is a script which I called server.pl that - for the sake of simplicity - I placed in the same directory where the module is:

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    use FindBin;
    use lib "$FindBin::Bin";
    use MyServer;

    my $server = MyServer->new;
    $server->run;

The FindBin part helps perl to find the module even if you are not running it from the directory where the script is.

Now if I run server.pl it will launch a web server on port 8080 and print the following message to the console:

HTTP::Server::Simple: You can connect to your server at http://localhost:8080/

So that's what I did and it displayed "Hello World" in the browser.

A more complex server

Now I can be really happy that I have been using CGI:Application for most of my web development lately as in that framework almost all the code goes into modules and the main script (or mod_perl handler) is just a few lines of code.

I can put those few lines in the MyServer.pm and I won't need to touch any other part of the application. So the server.pl script remained the same and the MyServer.pm changed to the following code:

    package MyServer;

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use base qw(HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

    use CPAN::Forum;

    sub handle_request {
        my ($self, $cgi) = @_;

        print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n";

        my $app = CPAN::Forum->new(
            TMPL_PATH => "$ENV{CPANFORUM_ROOT}/templates",
            PARAMS => {
                ROOT       => $ENV{CPANFORUM_ROOT},
                DB_CONNECT => "dbi:SQLite:$ENV{CPANFORUM_ROOT}/db/forum.db",
            },
        );
        $app->run;

        return;
    }

    1;

Here we load the CPAN::Forum module, print the "200 ok" HTTP response header and then the rest is a copy of the main script of CPAN::Forum. It just creates the CPAN::Forum object with some parameters and then runs it.

Now if I run the server.pl script I can browse to the http://localhost:8080/ address and use it exactly as it was on the real server. So I'll be able to write test using this small server.

Static pages

There is one issue remaining. I know CPAN::Forum does not have a nice visual effect but even that was slightly broken when running off the simple server. The reason is that normally the static files are handled by the web server and not the application and in our case nothing dealt with them. So no css style sheet and no images were shown. Javascript files would have had the same fate but no Javascript was used on this site.

In order to fix that I had to add some more code to MyServer.pm after some searching on CPAN I found HTTP::Server::Simple::Static that was created exactly for this problem. It is a mixin, adding a new method to the subclass I created:

Here is what I had to add to MyServer.pm

    use HTTP::Server::Simple::Static;

Obviously, loading the module. Then, just after the printing of the HTTP response I fetch the path_info from the CGI object which is the path in the requested URL. If this indicates one of the static files then I hand it over to the serve_static method giving it the CGI object and the path to the root of the web server.

    print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n";

    my $path = $cgi->path_info;
    if ($path =~  m{^/img/} or $path eq '/style.css') {
        return $self->serve_static( $cgi, "$ENV{CPANFORUM_ROOT}/www" );
    }
    #warn $path;

    my $app = CPAN::Forum->new(
    ...

The warn which commented out was used to find other requests that might need static handling.

That's it for now.

In one of the coming issues I should report on how testing CPAN::Forum progresses.

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