How mock stripe in Django unit test - django

Question

We used stripe for the payment system.
Imagine a user is doing different things in our system and for each part, he has to pay. We send these payments to Stripe by calling:
stripe.InvoiceItem.create()
Then we create and finalize the invoice for him by calling:
invoice=stripe.Invoice.create()
stripe.Invoice.finalize_invoice(invoice.id)
So if the user has to pay for 3 items:
item1 = 1
item2 = 2
item3 = 3
The finalize_invoice will have an id, total, ...., and:
total = 6
To test if all items are sending the correct amount to Stripe, I'd like to check the total.
In order to test our payment system, I had to mock Stripe, but the Stripe invoice total would always be zero.
I mocked stripe.InvoiceItem.create and stripe.Invoice.finalize_invoice and stripe.Invoice.create like this:
#patch("app_name.models.stripe.InvoiceItem.create")
#patch("app_name.models.stripe.Invoice.finalize_invoice")
#patch("app_name.models.stripe.Invoice.create")
def test_method(
self,
mock_create,
mock_finalize,
mock_invoice_item,
):
response = MagicMock()
# api_key and stripe_account from this link https://stripe.com/docs/api/connected_accounts
response.api_key = "sk_test_MSc53AbTknQXPy"
response.stripe_account = "acct_1032D82eZvKYlo2C" # Stripe account ID
# last version here https://stripe.com/docs/upgrades
response.stripe_version = "2022-08-01"
mock_invoice_item.return_value = response
response = MagicMock()
response.total = 20
response.invoice_pdf = "https://google.com"
response.id = "sk_test_MSc53AbTknQXPy"
mock_create.return_value = response
mock_finalize.return_value = response.id
Stripe might have a mocking feature.
Stripe-mock was not clear to me how to use it in unit tests.

Answer 1

I really don't know how you are mocking the different Stripe functions in order to pinpoint the issue with the the invoice total cost.
If you're thinking of using stripe-mock, I guess the best way to handle unit testing is to do so in an agnostic way (regardless of the stack), by running the stripe-mock Docker as described in the github Readme and create a proxy that will route any API call to the Docker URL instead of the actual API URL (https://api.stripe.com). This will allow you to do unit testing locally on your machine and even with your preferred CI/CD.
With that being said, please bear in mind that there are some known limitations described in the Readme doc.