BarricadeKit

BarricadeKit is a Swift rewrite of MMBarricade. The feature set and APIs are similar right now, but future updates will be to BarricadeKit rather than MMBarricade.

Why Barricade?

BarricadeKit is a framework for setting up a run-time configurable local server in iOS apps. This works by creating a NSURLProtocol "barricade" that blocks outgoing network traffic and redirects it to a custom, local response, without requiring any changes to existing networking code.

Most other local server implementations only support a single response per request, but Barricade supports multiple responses per request. This allows presentation of an interface at runtime for selecting which response will be returned. Being able to test multiple network paths without requiring a rebuild of the app is a significant time saver.

When to use

During development barricade is useful for easily exercising all edge cases of a feature while you are building it without needing to frequently adjust the live server state.

For unit tests and integration tests barricade allows you to easily toggle through each predefined response for a request so tests can cover edge cases thoroughly.

Similarly, UI tests, such as KIF, can programmatically update selected responses as well, which allows your test suite to cover failure cases as well as the "happy path".

Installing BarricadeKit

The easiest way to install BarricadeKit is with CocoaPods:

pod 'BarricadeKit', '~> 2.0.0'

Selection Interface

BarricadeKit comes with an in-app interface that can be presented to allow selection of network responses at runtime.

There are two approaches you can take for presenting the selection UI:

• Automatically present the interface when the device is shaken. To do this, just replace your UIWindow with an instance of an BarricadeShakeWindow. If you're using storyboards, override - window in your app delegate:

    lazy var window: UIWindow? = {
        return BarricadeShakeWindow(frame: UIScreen.main.bounds)
    }()

Note: By default the shake window is presented for Debug builds only. You can manually set BarricadeShakeWindow.isEnabled to adjust this behavior.

• Manually present a BarricadeViewController at any time in your app, just be sure to limit the presetation to debug builds if you don't want it to ship to the App Store.

App Store Submission

BarricadeKit is safe to include with App Store builds (and could be used to support things like a demo mode for your app), but most of the time you will probably want to ensure that the barricade is disabled for App Store builds. Here are a couple of approaches:

Conditionally enable

In your app, you can wrap the creation of the barricade inside a macro to limit the code execution to particular build configurations. For example:

#if DEBUG
Barricade.enableForDefaultSession()
#endif

Disable through CocoaPods

When installing through CocoaPods, you can specify particular build configurations to limit the installation of the library. For example:

pod 'BarricadeKit', '~> 2.0.0', :configurations => ['Debug']

Or, if you are only utilizing the library for unit tests, you may want to link the library with only your testing target:

target 'Tests', :exclusive => true do
  pod 'BarricadeKit', '~> 2.0.0'
end

License

BarricadeKit is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.