Proxy Mode

Moto can be run as a proxy, intercepting all requests to AWS and mocking them instead.
Some of the benefits:

  • Easy to configure for all SDK’s

  • Can be reached by Lambda containers, allowing you to mock service-calls inside a Lambda-function

Installation

Install the required dependencies using:

pip install moto[proxy]

You can then start the proxy like this:

$ pip install moto[proxy]
$ moto_proxy

Note that, if you want your Lambda functions to reach this proxy, you need to open up the moto_proxy:

$ moto_proxy -H 0.0.0.0

Warning

Be careful not to use this on a public network - this allows all network users access to your server.

Quick usage

The help command shows a quick-guide on how to configure SDK’s to use the proxy. .. code-block:: bash

$ moto_proxy –help

Extended Configuration

To use the MotoProxy while running your tests, the AWS SDK needs to know two things:

  • The proxy endpoint

  • How to deal with SSL

To set the proxy endpoint, use the HTTPS_PROXY-environment variable.

Because the proxy does not have an approved SSL certificate, the SDK will not trust the proxy by default. This means that the SDK has to be configured to either

  1. Accept the proxy’s custom certificate, by setting the AWS_CA_BUNDLE-environment variable

  2. Allow unverified SSL certificates

The AWS_CA_BUNDLE needs to point to the location of the CA certificate that comes with Moto.
You can run moto_proxy –help to get the exact location of this certificate, depending on where Moto is installed.

Environment Variables Configuration:

export HTTPS_PROXY=http://localhost:5005
aws cloudformation list-stacks --no-verify-ssl

Or by configuring the AWS_CA_BUNDLE:

export HTTPS_PROXY=http://localhost:5005
export AWS_CA_BUNDLE=/location/of/moto/ca/cert.crt
aws cloudformation list-stacks

Python Configuration

If you’re already using Moto’s mock_service-decorators, you can use a custom environment variable that configures everything automatically:

TEST_PROXY_MODE=true pytest

To configure this manually:

from botocore.config import Config

config = Config(proxies={"https": "http://localhost:5005"})
client = boto3.client("s3", config=config, verify=False)

Terraform Configuration

provider "aws" {
    region                      = "us-east-1"
    http_proxy                  = "http://localhost:5005"
    custom_ca_bundle            = "/location/of/moto/ca/cert.crt"
    # OR
    insecure                    = true
}

Drawbacks

Configuring a proxy means that all requests are intercepted, but the MotoProxy can only handle requests to AWS.

If your test includes a call to https://www.thirdpartyservice.com, that will also be intercepted by MotoProxy - and subsequently throw an error because it doesn’t know how to handle non-AWS requests.