That's a pretty peculiar way to test. I'd expect it to fail on all points. Your prepare isn't preparing anything. I barely know the internals but there is no request or CGI environment vars if you're calling it that way. I don't even know if it would have an engine chosen/present. You want Test::WWW::Mechanize::Catalyst and Catalyst::Test. Take a look at the main Runtime distribution's test directory for all kinds of nice examples.