[Catalyst] Testing against local but 'external' server?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

This is either a question about the
Test::WWW::Mechanized::Catalyst docs, or a question about how
to do something that should be necessary, I think.

I'm about to migrate to a new server, and this seemed like a
good occasion to actually learn how to write tests, so I've
been looking through the various docs and modules for this.

The T::W::M::Cat docs talk about the fact that the module
doesn't make real HTTP requests, instead it passes an HTTP
object to Cat; "localhost" or a link starting with "/" signals
that you're using this system. However, you can use a remote
server by using the allow_external method or setting the
CATALYST_SERVER env var. This does seem useful, so you don't
need a running server to do your tests.

However, it's not clear whether you can use these
remote-server techniques to _force_ the local address to be
regarded as an external server.

That is, if I want to test my Catalyst app against a real
server (for example, if I have server configuration settings
in an httpd.conf file, or some other reason why I need to test
my app against Apache instead of a Perl HTTP object), but I
want to do so on my local machine, how do I do it? I see from
the Catalyst::Test source that CATALYST_SERVER will override
the use of the HTTP object, but I can't quite follow what
T::W::M::Cat is doing. I'd like to be able to point to
http://localhost/myapp but have this be regarded as a remote
address that does use the server.

Thanks. I'd offer to fix the docs myself, but this isn't in
the Catalyst repo....there are minor typos, too.

Jesse Sheidlower