Hangar is a Rails Engine that exposes your FactoryGirl factories with a REST API available in the test environment only

Add Hangar to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hangar', group: :test

Your application must use FactoryGirl to manage its factories. Follow FactoryGirl's documentation to add factories to your application.

You may have special tables in your test database that should not be cleared by Hangar after a DELETE / request (see below in Usage). In this case, create an initializer in your app as follows:

# config/initializers/hangar.rb

Hangar.do_not_delete = %w(very_important_things valuable_bitcoin_keys spatial_ref_sys) if defined?(Hangar)

Not all ORMs support the deletion strategy, such as mongoid. You can override the clean strategy being used by the DELETE / request as follows:

# config/initializers/hangar.rb

Hangar.clean_strategy = :truncation

Hangar will create two factory routes for each factory registered with FactoryGirl. These routes mimic FactoryGirl's create and attributes_for methods, respectively:

POST /posts
GET /posts/new

Both will respond with a JSON representation of the object.

Hangar also provides a route to clean the database after each test:

DELETE /

This returns 204 No Content when successful.

You may override factory properties on your GET and POST requests using JSON as follows:

{ "post": { "title": "Dolor Sit Amet" } }

You may specify factory traits on your GET and POST requests using JSON as follows:

To specify traits POST the JSON as follows:

{ "traits": ["published"] }

Specifying JSON attributes to return is the same as the ActiveModel::Serializer's as_json() include option. In the below examples, comments is a has_many association of our model.

To include associations POST the JSON as follows:

{ "include": "comments" }

To specify which attributes to include on associations, POST the JSON as follows: { "include": { "comments": { "only": "text" } } }

In this case, text is an attribute on our comments model.

You must include the following headers with your requests:

Accept: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Type: application/json    
Factory: hangar

Hangar is designed to run in the test environment only. A warning will be displayed if it is loaded in any other environment.

We use hangar for marketing analytics at Faraday.

Copyright 2014 Andy Rossmeissl