Getting started with Espresso Martini

Espresso Martini is the latest project I have been working on. It's a mock server written fully in Swift and powered by Vapor.

There are many ways to go about mocking data, and each comes with a series of pros and cons. Overriding the URLProtocol is a great way to do it, but is limited to Apple's platforms. Another option is running a local server on your machine using a ready-to-use web server, but that requires you to (probably) deal with Javascript 🫣 and would only work on your simulator, and not your device offline.

Enters Espresso Martini. It has the best of both worlds; You can integrate it in your iOS or macOS application using SwiftPackageManager, or run the executable and use it with your web application or android application. It is extremely simple to use, and being written in Swift it offers type-safety and a super easy learning curve so anyone on the team can participate.

Creating a NetworkExchange

A NetworkExchange is a made of a request and response. The request object represents the request we want our server to intercept, whereas the response in what we would like for the server to return.

Below is a simple example on how create a NetworkExchange

MockServer.NetworkExchange(
  request: MockServer.Request(method: .GET, path: ["data"]), // 1
  response: MockServer.Response(
    status: .ok,
    headers: ["Content-Type": "application/json"],
    kind: .data(try! JSONEncoder().encode(Person(name: "Data")))
  ) // 2
)

1. This tells the server that it will need to intercept any request with a GET method, and a path to /data. The request support all HTTP methods.
2. This tells the server to return to return a response with a status code 200, ["Content-Type": "application/json"] as a header and some JSON data. The response supports all HTTP status codes as well as the following response kinds:

• empty (no response body)
• json
• data (any data, including images)
• string
• fileContent (data written on a file)

Configuring the server

It is really easy to configure the server. All you have to do is create an object that implements the ServerConfigurationProvider protocol. The package also provides a ready to use implementation SimpleConfigurationProvider that requires only the array of network exchanges. By default it will run the server on 127.0.0.1:8080.

To configure the server just call configure(using:) and pass in your configuration as follow: try server.configure(using: ServerConfiguration(networkExchanges: Demo.networkExchanges))

To configure the server locally, open the downloaded project and change the networkExchanges in the configuration in main.swift.

Running the server

To run the server from your iOS/macOS application use try server.run().

If you want to run the server locally on your Macbook, either open the Xcode project and click the play button, or from inside the project's root folder insert the following command on your terminal vapor run.