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Terminology

Service Consumer​

For HTTP: An application that initiates a HTTP request to another application (the service provider). Note that this does not depend on the way the data flows - whether it is a GET or a PUT / POST / PATCH, the consumer is the initiator of the HTTP request.

For messages: An application which reads a message or data structure that has been created by another application.

Service Provider​

For HTTP: A server that responds to an HTTP request from another application (the service consumer). A service provider may have one or more HTTP endpoints, and should be thought of as the "deployable unit" - endpoints that get deployed together should be considered part of the same provider.

For messages: An application that creates a message or data structure for another application to read.

Mock Service Provider​

For HTTP: The Pact mock provider is used by Pact tests in the consumer project to mock out the actual service provider, meaning that integration-like tests can be run without requiring the actual service provider to be available.

For messages: Consumers and providers often use an intermediary such as a queue, topic or an event bus to exchange messages, however, a message pact is deliberately technology agnostic. It focusses only on the payload, so there is no such thing as a Pact mock queue/topic/bus.

Interaction​

A request and response pair. Each interaction has a description and one or more provider states. An HTTP pact consists of a collection of interactions.

Pact file​

A file containing the JSON serialised interactions (requests and responses) or messages that were defined in the consumer tests. This is the Contract. A Pact defines:

  • the consumer name
  • the provider name
  • a collection of interactions or messages
  • the pact specification version (see below)

Pact verification​

For HTTP: To verify a Pact contract, the requests contained in a pact file are replayed against the provider code, and the responses returned are checked to ensure they match those expected in the pact file.

For messages: A piece of code on the provider is executed to cause a message for a given description to be generated, and the generated message is checked to ensure it matches that expected in the pact file.

Provider state​

On the consumer side, a provider state is a name describing a “state” (like a fixture) that the provider should be in when a given request is replayed against it - e.g. “when user John Doe exists” or “when user John Doe has a bank account”. These allow the same endpoint to be tested under different scenarios.

On the provider side, when the pact verification is executed, the provider state name will be used to identify the set up code block that should be run before the request is executed. The provider state set up code is written by the provider team.

Pact specification​

The Pact Specification is a document that governs the structure of the actual generated Pact files to allow for interoperability between languages (consider, for example, a JavaScript consumer connecting to a Scala JVM-based provider) , using semantic versioning to indicate breaking changes.

Each language implementation of Pact needs to implement the rules of this specification, and advertise which version(s) are supported, corresponding closely to which features are available.

The current version of the specification is 3.0 for the JVM implementation, and 2.0 for all others.

Pact Broker​

The Pact Broker is a permanently running, externally hosted service with an API and UI that allows contract testing to be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline. Like the Pact clients, the Pact Broker is an open source project.

Pactflow​

Pactflow is a commercial offering of the Pact Broker which adds features required to use Pact at scale.

The Matrix​

The Matrix is a table that shows the compatibility status of each consumer version and provider version, as determined by the contract verification results. It is a feature of the Pact Broker and Pactflow.

Can-I-Deploy​

Can-i-deploy is a command line tool that uses the Matrix to determine whether an application version is "safe" to deploy to a particular environment. To do this, it checks that there is a successful verification result between the application being deployed and the currently deployed version of each of the integrated applications in that environment. Can-i-deploy is a feature of the Pact Broker and Pactflow.

Pacticipant​

This is the term used in the Pact Broker/Pactflow API for "an application that participates in a pact". It was a pun created by the Pact Broker author, Beth Skurrie, before she had any idea that the Pact Broker would become such a widely used application. It is a naming decision that she sincerely regrets, 1. because of all the confusion it creates and 2. because she is now incapable of typing the word "participant".