# What is Smocker?
Smocker (server mock) is a simple and efficient HTTP mock server.
The goal of Smocker is to help you mock the HTTP dependencies of your application. It's a great tool for integration tests automation.
Smocker really shines in a microservice environment with an API gateway. On your development or test infrastructure, you just need to deploy it instead of your API gateway and have your application use it as the gateway.
Production environment, with an API gateway
Test environment, with Smocker
Smocker can also be used as an HTTP proxy through the commonly used http_proxy environment variable.
Production environment
Test environment, with Smocker using http_proxy
Smocker provides several powerful ways to setup your testing environment:
- Static mocks return a static response for a given request. It's the most basic behavior of Smocker,
- Dynamic mocks return a response with variable parts. Dynamic mocks can be declared using Go templates (opens new window) or Lua (opens new window),
- Proxies just forward the request to an actual server, because mocking is not always suitable for testing.
Smocker also has a great user interface which we use extensively to write tests iteratively.
