Pathod: A pathological HTTP daemon for testing and torturing client software

Really cool!

A year or two ago, I was working on some automated deployment tools that basically called a bunch of Rest APIs. As I discovered how unreliable the API calls could be at times, I ended up writing something kind of similar (although very application-specific to this) to be used as part of my unit tests for it - it helped immensely.

One thing that would be nice is if I could pre-define reactions to certain requests - ie, some sort of way to specify that when you get a POST at uri /add with a content-type of application/json, I want a 500 error (or maybe I want a 500 error 5% of the time) - rather than having to specify what I want in the actual request. Is this something your client library will make possible?

I like the idea, but does the syntax have to be that terse? It's quite expressive but less readable than code (or JSON/YAML), and I'm not sure why that's useful in this context.

Yes, this is something I've pondered too. The language is ugly for a number of reasons - not least the constraint of avoiding syntactically significant characters for both URLs (because of pathod) and shells (because of pathoc).

At the moment, my stance is that the syntax needs to be as terse as possible so that it can comfortably be specified in a URL, or in a snippet in a unit test. In the current master, there's a variant syntax that lets you use newlines (or arbitrary whitespace) wherever the more compact syntax uses colons. In time, I could see an argument for also expanding the single-letter abbreviations in this mode to make a more verbose syntax. There's also no reason why we couldn't add a way of describing requests by manipulating an object, which then compiles down to the request language.

Anyway, this is all still evolving - if you have ideas for keeping the language compact but making it less like line-noise, drop me a line.