# roboservant
Automatically fuzz your servant apis in a contextually-aware way.
# why?
Servant gives us a lot of information about what a server can do. We
use this information to generate arbitrarily long request/response
sessions and verify properties that should hold over them.
# example
Our api under test:
```
newtype Foo = Foo Int
deriving (Generic, Eq, Show, Typeable)
deriving newtype (FromHttpApiData, ToHttpApiData)
type FooApi =
"item" :> Get '[JSON] Foo
:<|> "itemAdd" :> Capture "one" Foo :> Capture "two" Foo :> Get '[JSON] Foo
:<|> "item" :> Capture "itemId" Foo :> Get '[JSON] ()
```
From the tests:
```
assert "should find an error in Foo" . not
=<< checkSequential (Group "Foo" [("Foo", RS.prop_sequential @Foo.FooApi Foo.fooServer)])
```
We have a server that blows up if the value of the int in a `Foo` ever gets above 10. Note:
there is no generator for `Foo` types: larger `Foo`s can only be made only by combining existing
`Foo`s with `itemAdd`. This is an important distinction, because many APIs will return UUIDs or
similar as keys, which make it impossible to cover a useful section of the state space without
using the values returned by the API
# why not servant-quickcheck?
[servant-quickcheck](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant-quickcheck)
is a great package and I've learned a lot from it. Unfortunately, as mentioned previously,
there's a lot of the state space you just can't explore without context: modern webapps are
full of pointer-like structures, whether they're URLs or database
keys/uuids, and servant-quickcheck requires that you be able to generate
these without context via Arbitrary.
## extensions/todo
- add some "starter" values to the store
- there may be a JWT that's established outside the servant app, for instance.
- `class Extras a where extras :: Gen [a]`
- default implementation `pure []`
- selectively allow some types to create values we haven't seen from the api.
`newtype FirstName = FirstName Text`, say.
- break down each response type into its components
- if i have
- `data Foo = FBar Bar | FBaz Baz`
- an endpoint `foo` that returns a `Foo`
- and an endpoint `bar` that takes a `Bar`
- I should be able to call `foo` to get a `Foo`, and if it happens to be an `FBar Bar`, I
should be able to use that `Bar` to call `bar`.
- better handling of properties to be verified
- some properties should always hold (no 500s): this already works.
- to-do: there may be some other properties that hold contextually
- healthcheck should be 200
- test complex permissions/ownership/delegation logic - should never be able to
get access to something you don't own or haven't been delegated access to.
## other possible applications
- coverage
- if you run the checker for a while and `hpc` suggests you still have bad coverage,
your api is designed in a way that requires external manipulation and may be improvable.
- benchmarking
- we can generate "big-enough" call sequences, then save the database & a sample call for each
endpoint that takes long enough to be a reasonable test.
- from this we can generate tests that a given call on that setup never gets slower.