I'm putting together a test suite for a web crawler.

In our initial version of the test suite, we hosted files on a publicly accessible web site and hard coded that URL into test cases which had the crawler download and process files obtained by spidering the hard coded URL.

We recently had to stop running the web server that we were directing our crawler to download from in our tests. Which breaks our tests. I'd like to find a way to test our crawler without having to publicly host files. Can anyone suggest an alternative approach?

My initial thought is that the test suite should somehow start up a fake web server which we could have tests try to download from. However, I couldn't find anyone suggesting a way to do that.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

In reply to Testing a web crawler by dlarochelle

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