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· 2 min read
tl;dr

The contract_requiring_verification_published webhook event is a new and improved version of the contract_content_changed event to use when triggering provider verification builds.

Webhooks in the Pact Broker can be triggered when certain predefined events occur. They are primarily used to obtain provider verification results for a pact when a new version is published with changed expectations. Historically, a webhook using the contract_content_changed event was used to trigger a build of the provider that verified just the changed pact, the URL of which would be passed through to the build using webhook template parameters.

A new and improved webhook event, contract_requiring_verification_published is now supported. It will be triggered if a pact is published with content that does not have a verification result from the main branch of the provider, or any of the deployed or released versions of the provider. The provider versions will be de-duplicated, and the webhook will then trigger once for each provider version. The provider version that needs to run the verification will be available in the webhook parameters as ${pactbroker.providerVersionNumber}. The triggered provider build must then check out the specified version of the provider codebase, and verify the changed pact, which will also be passed through via the ${pactbroker.pactUrl} parameter.

The contract_requiring_verification_published webhook has a number of advantages over the existing contract_content_changed webhook.

  • It makes it easy to obtain verification results from the test and production versions of your provider, allowing consumer versions with changed contracts that are already supported by the production provider to be deployed straight away.
  • It only triggers if there is a verification result missing for one of the critical provider versions, reducing the number of unnessary builds triggered.

Read more about the new event in the docs here to start using it.

· 7 min read
tl;dr

Tags that represent branches and environments are being replaced with first class support for branches, environments, deployments and releases.

"Tags" in the Pact Broker are simple string values that belong to application version resources (aka. "pacticipant versions") that are generally used to track the git branches and environments associated with an application version. They allow us to identify specific versions when testing backwards compatability and introducing new features, and when determining if an application is safe to deploy. Tags have the advantage of being flexible and generic enough to support any development workflow.

Tags have their disadvantages though. They are similar enough to Docker tags that users expect them to work the same way, but different enough that pages of documentation need to be written to explain how to use them. The main problem with tags though, is that no semantic information that can be inferred from them - that is, it's impossible for the Broker to know whether a tag represents a git branch, an environment, or something else entirely.

· One min read

When a Pact Broker instance has accumulated large amounts of data, its performance can start to degrade. A new feature has been released in the Pact Foundation's Pact Broker Docker image to allow old, unused data to be removed automatically from the Pact Broker at a configured schedule. The clean up can either run on a cron schedule from the Pact Broker application container, or it can be executed from an external location, independent of the running instance. Read more about the clean feature in the Maintenance section of our Pact Broker docs.

· 6 min read

tl;dr​

Changes to the contract made by the consumer teams can no longer break the provider builds. Hooray!

Read on for the longer version...

The problem

Pact is a consumer driven contract testing tool that allows you to test your integration points without dependencies. The consumer is tested with a mock provider, and a contract ("pact") is generated from the tests. The contract is taken over to the provider and then "verified" to make sure that the real provider and the mock provider behave the same way.

During the verification step, each request from the contract is replayed against a running test instance of the provider, and the responses are compared to the expected responses. If they match, the verification is successful. If they do not match, the verification has failed, and the provider build fails.

In the context of an existing contract, there are two reasons that the pact verification step can fail when it was previously passing.

  1. The provider has changed.
  2. The contract (consumer expectations) has changed.

In scenario 1, we actually want the provider build to fail, as this is the purpose of contract testing - it prevents breaking changes being made by the provider for existing consumers.

In scenario 2 however, when the contract has changed, the failure of the provider build is an undesirable consequence of the workflow. The contract may have changed due to the teams following the "consumer driven" nature of the process whereby the expectations come before the implementation (TDD for services); there may be an issue with the provider state data; or there may just be incorrect expectations about existing behaviour.

The fact that the provider build can be broken by new or incorrect expectations in the contract (which is effectively written by the consumer team) is one of the biggest problems people have with Pact. It leads to contention between teams, and in some cases, stops teams using Pact at all.

One solution could be to run all pact verification builds in such a way as to ignore any failures that might occur, but then we'd miss being alerted to potentially breaking changes by the provider, which defeats the purpose of using contracts in the first place.

What we want is a way to get feedback on changed contracts without breaking the provider build, but for the build to correctly identify and fail when a provider is making a breaking change.

The solution

The Pact team is extremely happy to introduce the new "pending pacts" feature.

Those familiar with automated testing frameworks have probably come across the term "pending" tests. These are tests that have a particular flag on them that causes them (depending on the framework) to either be skipped, or if executed, to not fail the build. In the case of Pact, we want the feedback we get from execution, so rather than a "pending pact" being one which will be skipped, it is one which can be verified without its failure causing the overall verification task to fail.

So how does the Pact verification tool know if a pact is in "pending" state or not? This is where the Pact Broker comes in. The Pact Broker is a service that sits between the consumer and provider builds, and allows the contracts and verification results to be exchanged between the consumer and provider teams. The Pact Broker can identify when a contract with new content has been published, and when it is retrieved for verification by the provider's Pact library, it flags it as "pending". The Pact library executes the verification, ensuring that the status of the overall task is not affected by any failures. At the end of the verification process, the outcome of the verification is published back to the Pact Broker. Once the pact has been successfully verified it ceases to be "pending". This means that any subsequent verification failures for a pact with identical content will cause the provider build to fail, as the failure can now only be due to a change in the provider code.

How do I start using pending pacts?

Head to https://docs.pact.io/pending for information on how to setup your Pact Broker to enable this feature (it is enabled by default on https://pactflow.io).

To start getting the benefit of this new and improved workflow, you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Pact Broker and your Pact testing libraries. Consult the documentation for your language to find out how to enable the pending feature.

If you're on a consumer team, and have, until now, relied on the provider team to alert you to verification failures, you'll want to make sure that you're getting this information via another channel now. We recommend that you use can-i-deploy to make sure that you aren't deploying with a broken contract, and that you set up webhooks to ensure you're made aware of the verification outcomes of your contracts as soon as possible (eg. posting to a team's Slack channel, or updating a Github commit status.)

A note for advanced Pact Broker users​

If you're not using tags in the Pact Broker you can skip this section! But take the time you've saved reading the next paragraph, and spend it reading up on tags because if you're not using them, you're probably not getting the full benefit out of your Pact Broker.

Tag users - the "pending" status is calculated using the provider version tag(s) that will be published with your verification results. The provider tags are sent to the Pact Broker when retriving the list of pacts to verify, and are used to determine the pending status for each pact returned. For example, once you have successfully verified a pact with a version of the provider tagged as feat-x, then pacts with the same content will be non-pending for any subsequent verifications by a feat-x version. However, the same pact could still be in "pending" state for the master.

Why is this important? It means that if you're using a feature branch tagged feat-x on your provider to implement a new interaction, the pact will remain pending on your master branch even after it passes verification on the feat-x branch. It will only become non-pending on master once the feature branch has been merged in, and the pact has passed verification on the merged code.

Conclusion

We're pretty excited about this new workflow, and we hope it will help make your experience testing with Pact a smoother and happier one. Let us know how you find it on the Pact Foundation Slack (join here).

· 4 min read

When following the "consumer driven" workflow, often the contract will change to express the desired functionality before the implementation exists in the provider. This means that when the changed pact is verified against the provider, the verification step fails, and until recently, this meant that the provider's build would also fail. (This has been fixed with the release of the pending pacts feature.) The recommended approach to avoid breaking the provider's build is to use "tags" to distinguish between the "safe" contracts and the changed contracts (tags are metadata that get applied to the application version resource in the Pact Broker that can be used to identify which branch or stage the version belongs to eg. master, feat/foo or prod). By making changes to the pact on a branch of the consumer (eg feat/foo) and publishing it with a matching tag, a provider that was configured to verify master pacts would not have its build broken.

For the consumer to get a verification result for the feat/foo pact, however, manual action was required from the provider team. They would need to add the feat/foo pact to the list of pacts to verify, generally on a feature branch of their own to avoid breaking the master build. There was no automated workflow to include the newly changed pacts in the provider's list of pacts to verify.

The solution

To solve this problem, we've introduced the concept of "WIP" (work in progress) pacts. "WIP pacts" is built on top of the recently released pending pacts feature which allows changed pacts to be verified without failing the build. Previously, during a verification step, only the pacts for the configured tags (eg master and prod) would be verified. With the WIP pacts feature enabled, all pacts that are the latest for their tag that have not yet been successfully verified will now also be automatically verified - in pending mode. This allows consumers to get feedback on whether or not their changed pacts are valid, without the provider team having to take action, and without breaking the provider build.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine FooApp and BarAPI have a pact. BarAPI is configured to verify the master and prod pacts for FooApp during its verification step. When it publishes the verification results, its own application version is tagged with the branch name. We'll just consider the builds that run on the BarAPI master branch for now.

FooApp creates a branch called feat/x, makes a change to the contract, and then publishes it with the feat/x tag. When the BarAPI build executes, it runs the verification task for the configured master and prod pacts as normal, but it also now verifies the feat/x pact in pending mode, and publishes the results back to the broker. Publishing the failed results allows the consumer team gets the feedback for feat/x pact, and the fact that it runs in pending mode means that even though the feat/x pact fails verification, the BarAPI build remains green.

A few days later, the BarAPI team implements the changes required for the feat/x pact. During the BarAPI CI build, master, prod and feat/x pacts are verified and the results published, but this time, the verification of the feat/x pact passes. The Pact Broker now knows that the master branch of the provider supports the feat/x contract, and from then on it ceases to be a WIP pact for master BarAPI versions. The next time the BarAPI build runs, it will not include the feat/x pact.

Now the action is on the consumer team to merge the feat/x branch into their own master branch. Using webhooks that update the Git commit status or posting to a Slack channel is a good way to notify the consumer team that their pact is now green.

A note for advanced Pact Broker users

As noted in the blog on the pending pacts feature, the pending status is calculated based on the tags that will be applied to the provider version when the verification results are published. This means that a pact that has been successfully verified by the feat/bar branch of your provider, but not master, will still be included in the "work in progress" pacts for master builds, but not for feat/bar builds.

How do I start using WIP pacts?

Head to https://docs.pact.io/wip for information on how to setup your Pact Broker (it is enabled by default on https://pactflow.io)

To start getting the benefit of this new and improved workflow, you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Pact Broker and your Pact testing libraries. Consult the documentation for your language to find out how to enable the WIP pacts feature.

· One min read

If you use Pact and would like to support us in realising our vision of transforming the way teams test and release distributed systems, we have recently released Pactflow - our fully managed Pact Broker with additional features to simplify teams getting started and scaling with Pact and contract testing.

Read our launch announcement for more background as to why and how this all came about. It's just the start, but we're really excited about the future.

If you're hosting your own broker, or are looking to set one up, you can get started quickly and for free on our Developer Plan.

We hope to see you soon!

· 3 min read

REST is dead, long live REST

GraphQL is being hailed by many as the new REST - it has type safety, a neat DSL and a great ecosystem. Perhaps best of all, it focuses on the needs of the client; consumers get the data they want, in the shape they want it - nothing more and nothing less.

I can now fetch data from my BFF via my React Component with caching, error handling and state management all taken care of for me, just like so:

import { Query } from "react-apollo";
import gql from "graphql-tag";

const ExchangeRates = () => (
  <Query
    query={gql`
      {
        rates(currency: "USD") {
          currency
          rate
        }
      }
    `}
  >
    {({ loading, error, data }) => {
      if (loading) return <p>Loading...</p>;
      if (error) return <p>Error :(</p>;

      return data.rates.map(({ currency, rate }) => (
        <div key={currency}>
          <p>{`${currency}: ${rate}`}</p>
        </div>
      ));
    }}
  </Query>
);

For some, however, this ability to define a schema and even generate client code, harkens back to the brittle and dark ages of WSDL, whereby clients are tightly coupled to their API implementation.

Can we have our cake and it it too?

 

If you look under the covers, it turns out GraphQL is actually just a simple abstraction over REST, which means we can still test GraphQL as we do with regular RESTful APIs - including using contract testing! 🙌

GraphQL (mostly) follows just a few simple rules:

  1. Requests are made via an HTTP POST
  2. GraphQL queries are sent as stringified JSON contained within a query property of the request
  3. The response body is wrapped in the data sub-property, namespaced by the operation (Query or Mutation) that is being called, alongside any errors for the operation.

Read more about the GraphQL specification here

Constructing a basic cURL for a simplistic hello operation looks something like this:

curl -X POST \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "query": "{ hello }" }' \
  http://someapi/api

Whilst you can create this request using the usual Pact DSL, in our latest version of Pact JS (6.x.x or @prerelease) we have even created a GraphQLInteraction interface to simplify creating the expectations - including variables support and matching rules:

  const graphqlQuery = new GraphQLInteraction()
    .uponReceiving("a hello request")
    .withQuery(`{ hello(person: $person }`)
    .withRequest({
      path: "/graphql",
      method: "POST",
    })
    .withVariables({
      person: "Sally",
    })
    .willRespondWith({
      status: 200,
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8",
      },
      body: {
        data: {
          hello: like("Hello Sally"),
        },
      },
    });

So there it is, Pact + GraphQL: a match made in heaven.

· 2 min read

If you're using Travis CI, Code Climate, or one of many other CI tools with Github, you've probably noticed the little checklist of items that shows just above the "merge" button when you open a pull request.

commit-statuses

These are called commit "statuses", and there is a Github API for reporting these (Gitlab also has a similar API). If you are using a git sha for the consumer version number when you publish your pacts, you can now use Pact Broker webhooks to report the verification statuses of your pacts back to Github.

To do this, open up your Pact Broker API Browser, and click on the NON-GET button next to the pb:webhooks relation. Modify the JSON below to match your consumer, repository and Github auth details (we recommend you make a separate token for this purpose with the repo:status grant), and click Make Request.

{
  "consumer": {
    "name": "<consumer name>"
  },
  "events": [
    {
      "name": "contract_published"
    },
    {
      "name": "provider_verification_published"
    }
  ],
  "request": {
    "method": "POST",
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/<organization>/<project>/statuses/${pactbroker.consumerVersionNumber}",
    "headers": {
      "Content-Type": "application/json"
    },
    "body": {
      "state": "${pactbroker.githubVerificationStatus}",
      "description": "Pact Verification Tests ${pactbroker.providerVersionTags}",
      "context": "${pactbroker.providerName}",
      "target_url": "${pactbroker.verificationResultUrl}"
    },
    "username": "USERNAME",
    "password": "PASSWORD"
  }
}

If all your consumer names match their repository names in Github, you can make this a global webhook by removing the consumer node, and replacing the hardcoded <project> name in the URL with the parameter ${pactbroker.consumerName}.

Want to use this cool feature? You'll need version 2.47.1 or later of the Pact Broker.

Check out the webhook template library for more handy webhooks.

· 2 min read

The can-i-deploy tool is a CLI that ensures you are safe to deploy a consumer or provider into a given environment. To do this, it queries the Pact Broker to ensure that there is a successful verification result between the existing application versions and the application version you're about to deploy.

If you deploy to a test environment as part of your build pipeline, you may find yourself in the situation where the verification result is unknown because the provider build is still running. What typically would happen is that a changed pact would trigger a provider build via a webhook in the Pact Broker, and the provider may not have finished before can-i-deploy is invoked.

To help out in this scenario, you can now use the following two options to let the can-i-deploy command poll until all the verification results arrive.

[--retry-while-unknown=TIMES] 
              # The number of times to retry while there is an unknown
              # verification result 
              # (ie. the provider verification is likely still running)
              # Default: 0
[--retry-interval=SECONDS]
              # The time between retries in seconds. 
              # Use in conjuction with --retry-while-unknown
              # Default: 10

Remember, however, that changes to pacts are best introduced on feature branches of your consumer. This allows your pact to be "pre-verified" by the time the branch is merged into master, which will mean can-i-deploy should never block your master build.

You can read about how to do this in The steps to reaching Pact Nirvana.

Want to use this new feature? You'll need version 1.48.0 or later of the Pact CLI, and version 2.23.4 or later of the Pact Broker