In a previous post we learned about Spring Cloud Contract. We saw how we can use contracts to implement the server side of the contract. But Spring Cloud Contract also creates a stub based on the contract. The stub server is implemented with Wiremock and Spring Boot. The server can match incoming requests with the contracts and send back the response as defined in the contract. Let’s write an application that is invoking HTTP requests on the server application we wrote before. In the tests that we write for this client application we use the stub that is generated by Spring Cloud Contract. We know the stub is following the contract of the actual server.

First we create the stub in our server project with the Gradle task verifierStubsJar. The tests in the client application need these stub and will fetch it as dependency from a Maven repository or the local Maven repository. For our example we use the local Maven repository. We add the maven-publish plugin to the server project and run the task publishToMavenLocal.

Spring Cloud Contract is a project that allows to write a contract for a service using a Groovy DSL. In the contract we describe the expected requests and responses for the service. From this contract a stub is generated that can be used by a client application to test the code that invokes the service. Spring Cloud Contract also generates tests based on the contract for the service implementation. Let’s see how we can use the generated tests for the service implementation for a Ratpack application.

Spring Cloud Contract comes with a Gradle plugin. This plugin adds the task generateContractTests that creates tests based on the contract we write. There are also tasks to create the stub for a client application, but here we focus on the server implementation. In the following Gradle build file for our Ratpack application we use the Spring Cloud Contract Gradle plugin. We configure the plugin to use Spock as framework for the generated tests.