If you're working with APIs or the web in python you will (or should) have
heard of requests. The 'HTTP for Humans' library is one of python's most
popular and most downloaded libraries and is referenced by the urllib docs as
the recommended way to do HTTP requests in python.

As strict unit testers of our code we need to assert that our projects are
making the expected HTTP requests however don't want to be making actual
network connections. Most people start with simply mocking this requests
interface but this is much more complex than it appears on first glance and
frequently ends up replicating large chunks of the interface or skipping mocked
out functions within your code.

In this talk I'll cover two libraries that can help you mock out your HTTP
requests: requests-mock and betamax.

requests-mock is the extended and more correct version of mocking out the
interface. It lets you ensure that the requests you expect are going over the
wire, but ensures that all the bytes/strings, json decoding and other helper
features that requests offers work, without your mocks becoming unmanageable.

Betamax gives you functional style testing without the network connection. It
allows you to record real interactions through requests, store that to file,
and replay them later in testing.

Between them we can assert our behaviour both against our local, constructed
responses, and real recorded responses our application has made.

With a small example app I'll demonstrate how you can use these libraries, the
different benefits of each, and how to structure your tests to make the most
use of them.