How to Build a Contract Test Suite for Your LLM Gateway Layer
Developers running a proxy in front of AI model providers face bugs not in the models themselves, but in the gateway layer — such as mishandled headers, incorrect error translations, or accidentally buffered streams. A purpose-built contract test suite should verify two core promises: that the gateway speaks an OpenAI-compatible contract downstream and faithfully translates requests upstream. Rather than relying on live model calls, the recommended approach uses a fake local HTTP server to return controlled fixtures, making tests fast, deterministic, and suitable for every pull request. Tools like Mock Service Worker's Node interceptor allow the gateway's real HTTP client, timeout, and retry logic to execute against these stubs. One of the most critical test assertions is confirming that unknown or unrecognized fields from upstream responses are preserved, since a gateway that silently drops them can cause users to lose data like log probabilities or cache metrics.
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