cURL

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:19:24 +0000

cURL is one of my favorite tools when working with REST APIs. The use of this tool is found in almost all scripts. With it, you can test your HTTP handlers and even write example requests and responses in the service documentation. Of course, there are other tools, such as HTTPie, xh and others. But its popularity is due to the fact that in most cases it will already be installed in your environment. So when someone has problems with a request to a service I’m responsible for, I always ask them to send me the curl request and its output, like this:

Webmock for test external HTTP API calls

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:16:20 +0000

One of my favorite libraries for testing external HTTP requests in Ruby is Webmock. To use it, you just need to specify what you want to get for which URL. Of course, you can also stab the response from the HTTP client in tests (as is common in other languages) or even set up your own HTTP mock server, but in my opinion, for simple things, this seems too unreasonable. How do you test requests to external resources? Share your best practices for testing HTTP requests.

API on Artem Yegorov

cURL

Webmock for test external HTTP API calls