Provider side of PACT using gradle - gradle

Question

I am new to PACT. My application is a spring boot application. Consumer has pact created in PACT broker. Now I am trying to run tests from providers end and I am using gradle plugin to run tests. I have couple of questions:
Pact published by consumer do not have any states specified. So this means I don't have to use any stateChangeUrl at provider side ?
Pact published has get method. However when I run pactVerify server starts and my pact tests are failing because I don't have any existing data. How can I inject data after.
What I am trying to achieve is: When I say pactVerify
Server starts up, and my spring boot app should be up and running in localhost (This is good)
Before pacts are verified I need to inject some data like "POST\add User. So that pact test passes when it tries to do GET\User. (How to do this ?)
Below is my gradle file
pact {
serviceProviders {
'user-api' {
protocol = 'http'
host = 'localhost'
port = 8080
startProviderTask = startService
terminateProviderTask = stopService
if ('pactVerify' in gradle.startParameter.taskNames) {
hasPactsFromPactBroker('http://pactbroker.com') {
< How to write some code here to say do POST before running PACT >
}
}
}
}

Answer 1

Pact published by consumer do not have any states specified. So this means I don't have to use any stateChangeUrl at provider side ?
It means you have chosen not to use this mechanism to change states, and therefore yes, you don't need to use that URL. But you may wish to change your mind on that.
Pact published has get method. However when I run pactVerify server starts and my pact tests are failing because I don't have any existing data. How can I inject data after.
Why not inject the data before you start all of the tests? If you don't have states to worry about, then you may as well just start the provider with the data pre-loaded into the database.
As noted, all of the configuration info can be found at https://github.com/DiUS/pact-jvm/tree/master/pact-jvm-provider-gradle.

Answer 2

The consumer code needs to declare provider states in the pact to allow you to set up the right data for the interaction.
From docs.pact.io
Each interaction in a pact should be verified in isolation, with no context maintained from the previous interactions. Tests that depend on the outcome of previous tests are brittle and land you back in integration test hell, which is the nasty place you're trying to escape by using pacts.
So how do you test a request that requires data to already exist on the provider? Provider states allow you to set up data on the provider by injecting it straight into the data source before the interaction is run, so that it can make a response that matches what the consumer expects. The name of the provider state is specified in the given clause of an interaction in the consumer, and then used to find the block of code to run in the provider to set up the right data. If you need to stub a downstream system, or return an error response that is difficult to cause in the normal scheme of things (e.g. a 500), this is the place where you can set up stubs.
Provider states also allow the consumer to make the same request with different expected responses (e.g. different response codes, or the same resource with a different subset of data).
Keep in mind that a provider state is all about the state of the provider (eg. what data is there, how it is going to handle a given response), not about the state of the consumer, or about what is in the request.
Refer to the the Ruby example to see how this plays out in code.