Overview
Contract testing allows for testing the integrations between services without having to run real services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IetyhDr48RI
The most prevalent tool/framework for conducting contract testing is PACT https://pact.io/ which works for almost all languages and frameworks.
Combining with a Pact Broker, this can help track and check the compatibilities between different versions of services to help prevent the problem of deploying incompatible versions into production.
Capabilities of PACT
Capability | Documentation | Spiked |
|---|---|---|
Consumer Node JS - API | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pact-foundation/pact#consumer-side-testing | ✅ |
Producer Node JS - API | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pact-foundation/pact#provider-api-testing | ✅ |
Consumer Node JS - Async | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pact-foundation/pact#asynchronous-api-testing | ✅ |
Producer Node JS - Async | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pact-foundation/pact#provider-producer | ✅ |
Consumer JVM - API | ✅ | |
Producer JVM - API | ✅ | |
Consumer JVM - Async | ❌ - In documentation, but not tried it. | |
Producer JVM - Async | ❌ - In documentation, but not tried it. |
JVM pact supports both Java and Kotlin.
Pact files are technology agnostic, so a pact file created by a NodeJS consumer can be used to verify a JVM producer and vice versa.
Pact testing for Flutter is still an unknown.
Capabilities of PACT Broker
Pact Broker (OSS - Free, self hosted) : https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact_broker
Pact Flow (Commercial - $$, managed hosting with self hosted option at “enterprise” level) : https://pactflow.io/
Main differences can be found here: https://pactflow.io/features/
Capability | Spiked |
|---|
Capability | Spiked |
|---|---|
Store consumer created file (versioned) | ✅ |
Provide consumer created pact file to verify producer | ✅ |
Record which producer and consumer combination have bee successfully verified | ✅ |
Allow to indicate which versions of which services have been deployed where | ✅ |
Allow to check a service version compatible with deployed services in an environment | ✅ |
Draw network diagram of services | ✅ |
Authentication and Authorisation | ✅ - Supported in Pact Flow only, not supported in Pact Broker |
OpenAPI based provider driven contract testing | ❌ - Supported in Pact Flow only, not supported in Pact Broker - https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/workshops/bi-directional/contracts/oas/ |