It is a well-know topic within the Elixir community: “To mock or not to mock? :)”

Every alchemist probably has his / her own opinion concerning this topic. José Valim and Plataformatec has published the Hex package Mox which complies with his article on mocking in Elixir.

Personally, I’m not convinced in having to change the code “in service of” testing certain modules. Why would one add abstraction to code of which its purpose isn’t supposed to be interchangeable (with mock modules for instance)?

After some Googling, I found Espec of which I thought that that’s a little bit too much. Finally, I found Mock which could have done the job. But there are two downsides:

1. You cannot use async: true
2. Defining the mock functions could have been done in a more readable way

Based on that, I decided to write MecksUnit which solves just that. An example:

# (in test/test_helper.exs)

ExUnit.start()
MecksUnit.mock()

# (in test/mecks_unit_test.exs)

defmodule Foo do
  def trim(string) do
    String.trim(string)
  end
end

defmodule MecksUnitTest do
  use ExUnit.Case, async: true
  use MecksUnit.Case

  defmock String do
    def trim("  Paul  "), do: "Engel"
    def trim("  Foo  ", "!"), do: "Bar"
    def trim(_, "!"), do: {:passthrough, ["  Surprise!  !!!!", "!"]}
    def trim(_, _), do: :passthrough
  end

  defmock List do
    def wrap(:foo), do: [1, 2, 3, 4]
  end

  mocked_test "using mocked module functions" do
    task =
      Task.async(fn ->
        assert "Engel" == String.trim("  Paul  ")
        assert "Engel" == Foo.trim("  Paul  ")
        assert "Bar" == String.trim("  Foo  ", "!")
        assert "  Surprise!  " == String.trim("  Paul  ", "!")
        assert "MecksUnit" == String.trim("  MecksUnit  ")
        assert "Paul Engel" == String.trim("  Paul Engel  ", " ")
        assert [1, 2, 3, 4] == List.wrap(:foo)
        assert [] == List.wrap(nil)
        assert [:bar] == List.wrap(:bar)
        assert [:foo, :bar] == List.wrap([:foo, :bar])
      end)

    Task.await(task)
  end

  test "using the original module functions" do
    task =
      Task.async(fn ->
        assert "Paul" == String.trim("  Paul  ")
        assert "Paul" == Foo.trim("  Paul  ")
        assert "  Foo  " == String.trim("  Foo  ", "!")
        assert "  Paul  " == String.trim("  Paul  ", "!")
        assert "MecksUnit" == String.trim("  MecksUnit  ")
        assert "Paul Engel" == String.trim("  Paul Engel  ", " ")
        assert [:foo] == List.wrap(:foo)
        assert [] == List.wrap(nil)
        assert [:bar] == List.wrap(:bar)
        assert [:foo, :bar] == List.wrap([:foo, :bar])
      end)

    Task.await(task)
  end
end

Mocking module functions is pretty straightforward and done as follows:

1. Add use MecksUnit.Case at the beginning of your test file
2. Use defmock as if you would define the original module with defmodule containing mocked functions
3. Use mocked_test as if you would define a normal ExUnit test after having defined all the required mock modules
4. Add MecksUnit.mock() in your test/test_helper.exs file

The defined mock modules only apply to the first mocked_test encountered. So they are isolated (despite of :meck having an unfortunate global effect) as MecksUnit takes care of it. Also, non-matching function heads within the mock module will result in invoking the original module function as well. And last but not least: you can just run the tests asynchronously.

Enjoy using MecksUnit (if you prefer unobtrusive mocking). A Github star is very welcome, haha ;)