I’m using Phoenix to power the backends for a couple of Ember projects I am writing. For those applications, I’ve been using OAuth2 + cookie-based sessions to authenticate my users. When testing the authentication flow, I wanted to make sure that I was properly retrieving my session from the cookie I previously set.
The hard way (pre Phoenix v0.13)
The following maintains a session across multiple requests:
test "Creating a session with a GitHub code" do
use_cassette "successful_sign_in" do
response = conn(:post, "/api/v1/session", %{ "authorizationCode" => "dan", "format" => "json", "provider" => "github-oauth2" })
|> DoorApi.Endpoint.call([])
assert response.status == 201
current_session_request = conn(:get, "/api/v1/session")
current_session_response = response.cookies
|> Enum.reduce(current_session_request, fn ({key, value}, conn) -> put_req_cookie(conn, key, value) end)
|> DoorApi.Endpoint.call([])
assert current_session_response.status == 200
end
end
The above code copies the cookies from the first (completed) request, and appends them to the second request. This allows you to retrieve information from the session returned in the first request.
But wait! There is a better way
With the release of Phoenix v0.12, new test helpers debuted that allow for the concept of connection recycling. TL;DR: the new helpers create a new connection with the details of the old, completed connection. We can update our first example to use the new helpers:
test "Creating a session with a GitHub code" do
use_cassette "successful_sign_in" do
# We call the conn function to get us an initial connection.
# From then on, we just pass the result of the last request to the helpers
conn = post(conn(), "/api/v1/session", %{ "authorizationCode" => "dan", "format" => "json", "provider" => "github-oauth2" })
assert conn.status == 201
conn = get(conn, "/api/v1/session")
assert conn.status == 200
end
end
The helpers remove the need to call our endpoint, and make the code much more concise. This is a huge improvement to testing in Phoenix.
You can see a bit more about the helpers in the Phoenix.ConnTest documentation
