Using specific VCR cassette based on request

Question

Situation: testing a rails application using Rspec, FactoryGirl and VCR.

Every time a User is created, an associated Stripe customer is created through Stripe's API. While testing, it doesn't really makes sense to add a VCR.use_cassette or describe "...", vcr: {cassette_name: 'stripe-customer'} do ... to every spec where User creation is involved. My actual solution is the following:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.around do |example|
    VCR.use_cassette('stripe-customer') do |cassette|
      example.run
    end
  end
end

But this isn't sustainable because the same cassette will be used for every http request, which of course is very bad.

Question: How can I use specific fixtures (cassettes) based on individual request, without specifying the cassette for every spec?

I have something like this in mind, pseudo-code:

stub_request(:post, "api.stripe.com/customers").with(File.read("cassettes/stripe-customer"))

Relevant pieces of code (as a gist):

# user_observer.rb

class UserObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer

  def after_create(user)
    user.create_profile!

    begin
      customer =  Stripe::Customer.create(
        email: user.email,
        plan: 'default'
        )

      user.stripe_customer_id = customer.id
      user.save!
    rescue Stripe::InvalidRequestError => e
      raise e
    end

  end
end


# vcr.rb

require 'vcr'

VCR.configure do |config|
  config.default_cassette_options = { record: :once, re_record_interval: 1.day }
  config.cassette_library_dir = 'spec/fixtures/cassettes'
  config.hook_into :webmock
  config.configure_rspec_metadata!
end


# user_spec.rb

describe :InstanceMethods do
  let(:user) { FactoryGirl.create(:user) }

  describe "#flexible_name" do
    it "returns the name when name is specified" do
      user.profile.first_name = "Foo"
      user.profile.last_name = "Bar"

      user.flexible_name.should eq("Foo Bar")
    end
  end
end

Edit

I ended doing something like this:

VCR.configure do |vcr|
  vcr.around_http_request do |request|

    if request.uri =~ /api.stripe.com/
      uri = URI(request.uri)
      name = "#{[uri.host, uri.path, request.method].join('/')}"
      VCR.use_cassette(name, &request)

    elsif request.uri =~ /twitter.com/
      VCR.use_cassette('twitter', &request)
    else
    end

  end
end

Answer 1

VCR 2.x includes a feature specifically to support use cases like these:

https://relishapp.com/vcr/vcr/v/2-4-0/docs/hooks/before-http-request-hook! https://relishapp.com/vcr/vcr/v/2-4-0/docs/hooks/after-http-request-hook! https://relishapp.com/vcr/vcr/v/2-4-0/docs/hooks/around-http-request-hook!

VCR.configure do |vcr|
  vcr.around_http_request(lambda { |req| req.uri =~ /api.stripe.com/ }) do |request|
    VCR.use_cassette(request.uri, &request)
  end
end