Quick update: It turns out mocking is actually not necessary for firebase-server itself, as goOffline() does indeed prevent the internal client from connecting to Google. I'll update the PR text above to reflect this.

Alright, only four failing tests left. These will be tricky, because they concern testing the client authentication features (using generated "custom tokens"). When the firebase module is used from within a NodeJS environment, it exposes a different API - it assumes you are running it on a server, and the only authentication method supported is Google service accounts.

Firebase seems to determine at runtime which "version" of itself to use - either the Browser or the Server implementation of the Firebase client.

This creates an interesting problem - when running in the browser, your code consuming Firebase will have access to a completely different API than it will have access to while running mocha tests in NodeJS.

Looks promising, thanks!

Well I guess this PR was getting a bit stale. I've been poking around trying to improve all this but haven't made much progress. I'll open a new PR for some cleanup.

Thank you @nfarina , I am working on finishing it as we speak. We still have 4 tests fail since there is no authentication API on the server side. I will commit my progress so far in a few minutes

OK cool, I'll check that out when you're ready. There is one small bugfix that I hadn't checked in yet - in index.js:

Also, the proxyquire dep needs to be moved from devDependencies to just dependencies - the firebase module needs to always be mocked for firebase-server to work at all.

yes, I just figured that one myself now :)

Regarding proxyquire - I don't see it being used inside index.js, can you explain why it is required then?

It's not mocked in index.js currently but perhaps should be. Right now the tests pass because the test runner happens to set up the mocks before index.js is required. You'll see the problem if you try to run firebase-server as a "standalone server" listening on a port - i.e. not in a test context. It won't work at all unless someone (itself?) mocks firebase.

Well of course now I can't repro that problem. Perhaps goOffline does in fact prevent firebase from reaching out to Google Auth. Trying to remember why I thought this was a problem now.

Alright I'm wrong! goOffline does the trick, and running firebase-server from the command-line works just fine without mocks. Wow, that makes things much much simpler.

That's superb! I am about to finishing fixing tests, committing soon and aiming for 0.6.0 release today, with Firebase 3 support :-)

Awesome. Oh, and in regards to the @global flag for proxyquire, I think it's much less harmful than it appears - it's only "global" within the local context of modules internally loaded by firebase itself, not global across the entire loaded NodeJS app.

Seems like we tests are passing now, hooray!

Wow, your mocking method is so much cleaner! Looks awesome and seems to work great.

Thank you :)

It took a few hours of experimentation to get there though...

Released as 0.6.0. Thank you again for all your contribution to this release!

This is great! Thanks @nfarina and @urish!