RoboHydra is a web server designed to help you test any kind of HTTP-based client: GUIs that use a public API, mobile applications that communicate with some server in order to retrieve information, complex Javascript front-ends that use the server mostly as a data store, etc.
RoboHydra allows you to easily build custom “mock” servers with little effort, be it to build a test suite or easily reproduce problems while fixing bugs. You can even add functionality to your RoboHydra-based server via its web interface, which is very useful when doing exploratory testing of your client. All these capabilities can also be combined with proxying in several useful ways.
For more information about the different ways in which you can use RoboHydra, have a look at the use cases (now includes a comic!).
To get started, go read the basic tutorial and the more advanced tutorial. There are also a number of screencasts in the RoboHydra YouTube channel.
Dev Opera published three articles on RoboHydra that serve as tutorials for different RoboHydra use cases:
Robohydra: a new testing tool for client-server interactions serves as a general introduction and covers how to build a simple development proxy for front-end developers.
Using RoboHydra as a mock server covers how to use RoboHydra to build mock servers that help you reproduce bugs and build a functional testsuite.
RoboHydra: advanced techniques covers advanced techniques that can be applied to any kind of RoboHydra server.
You also have reference documentation available. The sources don’t have embedded documentation (yet), but most of what you need is described in the pages above, and the rest you can read in the sources themselves (they’re still small and easy to understand).
You can get the code on GitHub, or install RoboHydra via NPM with the following command:
npm install robohydraYou can check the ChangeLog for the changes between versions.
For updates and announcements related to this project, follow @robohydra on Twitter, subscribe to the development group on Google Groups, watch project robohydra on GitHub or subscribe to the RoboHydra channel on YouTube.
This code is Copyright 2012-2013 Esteban Manchado Velázquez, and it’s released under the Apache 2.0 license. Jacob Rask did all the CSS for the admin interface (and I stole it for this website). If you knew me you would be able to tell that I hadn’t written that CSS.
This project started at Opera Software ASA as an internal tool to test some of our projects. Large parts of this code were (and still are) developed there, but as it’s pretty generic we decided to open source it. See Opera’s GitHub account for more open source goodies.