how to mock REST calls during development?

Hello everyone,

I'm working on a Django application which needs to communicate with a 3rd-party REST API. In production the flow would be like this;

1. end-user browser sends a request to my django server
   
2. my server makes a remote REST call to 3rd party server
   
3. 3rd party server responds
   
4. my server sends back response to end-user's browser

I'm simulating the above flow during development by using the Httpretty mocking library. Here is how my view looks like;

import httpretty

THIRD_PARTY_SERVER = http://api.gitlab.com/

def my_view(request):
    if settings.DEBUG:
        httpretty.enable()
        httpretty.register_uri(httpretty.GET, THIRD_PARTY_SERVER, body='{some_mock_response_here}')

    partner_response = requests.get(THIRD_PARTY_SERVER)

    if settings.DEBUG:
        httpretty.disable()
        httpretty.reset()

    # Do some stuff here
    # ...

    return render(request, 'template.html', context)

For the most part, the above works. I can experiment around without hitting the 3rd-party API. But it doesn't feel good. My mocking code is now part of the view function - not what I consider a good design. Problem is, I'm not sure how else this can be done? Does anyone have any better ideas? Note - I'm not doing any testing here. Just need a way to mock 3rd-party REST responses during development when I run "python manage.py runserver" for debugging/experimentation. 

Ideally, I'd like to move all the mocking code to it's own file and away from my views. This should somehow get activated when I start 'runserver' and work for all my views. 

Puzzled,

Abraham V.

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