Stubbed request not allowing http connections (Real HTTP connections are disabled.) - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am trying to stub a POST request to an external API. The spec test does not replace the ENV variable with my fake one and goes to my local env (localhost:3000) in the stub request returning this error:
Failure/Error: response = http.request(request)
WebMock::NetConnectNotAllowedError:
Real HTTP connections are disabled. Unregistered request: POST http://localhost:3000/Target with body '{"name":"Wayfarer"}' with headers {'Accept'=>'*/*', 'Accept-Encoding'=>'gzip;q=1.0,deflate;q=0.6,identity;q=0.3', 'User-Agent'=>'Ruby'}
You can stub this request with the following snippet:
stub_request(:post, "http://localhost:3000/Target").
with(
body: "{\"name\":\"Wayfarer\"}",
headers: {
'Accept'=>'*/*',
'Accept-Encoding'=>'gzip;q=1.0,deflate;q=0.6,identity;q=0.3',
'User-Agent'=>'Ruby'
}).
to_return(status: 200, body: "", headers: {})
My test is:
let!(:user) { create(:user, target: 'Wayfarer') }
before(:each) do
allow(ENV).to receive(:fetch).with('API_METADATA_URL').and_return('http://example.com')
end
describe '#create_target' do
context 'successful API request to create target' do
it 'sends data to API and sets response instance variables' do
target = user.target
stub_request(:post, 'http://example.com/Target').with(
headers: {
},
body: '{
"name": "Wayfarer"
}'
).to_return(
status: 200,
body: '{"id": "uuid",' \
'"name": "Wayfarer",' \
'"created_at": 00000,' \
'"updated_at": 00000}'
)
api_client = ApiClient.new
api_client.create_target(target)
expect(api_client.response_status).to eq(200)
expect(api_client.response_body).to eq(
{
'id' => 'uuid',
'name' => 'Wayfarer',
'created_at' => 00000,
'updated_at' => 00000
}
)
end
end
end
It doesn't even reach the test, instead it seems to run the ApiClient as is including using my local environment variable (as stated above).

Answer 1

I ended up needing a separate .env file for tests (.env.test.local) for the API_METADATA_URL for a url that did not throw the error.