Message Provider Validation against Pact Broker Wrongly Succeeds

I have a strange behavior during message provider verification.

I successfully published a message pact to my test pact broker instance (v 2.26.0, hosted by you, if it helps 😉). When viewing the message pact in the pact broker, it says Note: this contract could not be parsed to a v1 or v2 Pact, showing raw content instead. and only shows the JSON.

When I run my provider test, it succeeds, even though my message provider returns an invalid message.

When I run the provider test against a local pact file instead, it fails, as I would expect.

Maybe the verifier doesn’t find the pact on the broker (because the broker does not support message contracts) and since it hasn’t found a pact, it just succeeds? If this is the case:

• I would expect the verifier to fail if it doesn’t find any pacts to test against.
• when will the pact broker support message contracts? 😉

[mefellows]

OK, so if you turn on debugging you might get more of an indication as to what is happening. It looks like “latest” is not a tag (also you shouldn’t tag anything "latest", I think it’s documented somewhere…, but mainly because latest is a special case in the broker, see below).

Although it’s not a tag, it’s tricking Pact Node by not returning a 40x type error when it goes to find relevant pacts. But when it invokes the verification process, it doesn’t yet have a Pact and fires off the command omitting some key properties - e.g.

[2018-11-25T06:45:57.311Z]  INFO: pact-node@6.19.11/62781 on macfellows.local: Created './standalone/darwin-1.54.4/bin/pact-provider-verifier --broker-username 'dXfltyFMgNOFZAxr8io9wJ37iUpY42M' --broker-password 'O5AIZWxelWbLvqMd8PkAVycBJh2Psyg1' --publish-verification-results 'true' --provider-app-version '1.0.0' --provider-base-url 'http://localhost:54819'' process with PID: 62787

With the correct tags, you’ll see it adds a bunch more:

[2018-11-25T06:49:57.613Z]  INFO: pact-node@6.19.11/63373 on macfellows.local: Created './standalone/darwin-1.54.4/bin/pact-provider-verifier 'https://test.pact.dius.com.au/pacts/provider/node-message-provider/consumer/node-message-consumer/version/1.0.1543124323' --broker-username 'dXfltyFMgNOFZAxr8io9wJ37iUpY42M' --broker-password 'O5AIZWxelWbLvqMd8PkAVycBJh2Psyg1' --publish-verification-results 'true' --provider-app-version '1.0.0' --provider-base-url 'http://localhost:54838''

By omitting the latest tag it will, ironically, automatically pick up the latest pact. I’ve happened to tag this pact as prod and so searching for that tag also works.

So this is definitely a bug, and the bug is in pact-node. I’ll move the issue and get it fixed - thanks for the report!

[mefellows]

I think this issue is resolved now @thombergs - can you please confirm?