You're building a test suite for a React application that communicates with an external API. How can you ensure that actual API calls are not made during the test runs?

To ensure that actual API calls are not made during test runs, you can use a mocking library like Jest's jest.mock to mock the API calls. This allows you to replace the real API calls with mocked responses, enabling controlled and predictable testing without hitting external services. Manually disabling the network connection or deploying to a staging environment is not practical or recommended for unit testing. Rewriting API calls to return fake data can be done through mocking, which is a more effective approach.