How to Use the Sinon stub() Function

Jan 3, 2022

With the stub() function, you can swap out a function for a fake version of that function with pre-determined behavior. This is helpful for testing edge cases, like what happens when an HTTP request fails.

The sinon.stub() substitutes the real function and returns a stub object that you can configure using methods like callsFake(). Stubs also have a callCount property that tells you how many times the stub was called. For example, the below code stubs out axios.get() for a function that always returns { status: 200 } and asserts that axios.get() was called once.

const axios = require('axios');
const sinon = require('sinon');
const assert = require('assert');

const stub = sinon.stub(axios, 'get').callsFake(() => Promise.resolve({ status: 200 }));
// Calls the fake `axios.get()`
const test = await axios.get('https://httpbin.org/get');

assert.deepEqual(test, { status:200 }); // passes
assert.strictEqual(stub.callCount, 1); // passes

Using getCall()

Stubs also have a getCall() function that returns data on a particular function call. For example, stub.getCall(0) returns an object that contains data on the first time the stub was called, including arguments and returnValue:

const call = stub.getCall(0);

call.args; // ['https://httpbin.org/get']
call.returnValue; // Promise { { status: 200 } }

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