django-webtest

django-webtest is an app for instant integration of Ian Bicking's WebTest (http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/webtest/) with Django's testing framework.

Installation

$ pip install django-webtest

Usage

from django_webtest import WebTest

class MyTestCase(WebTest):

    # optional: we want some initial data to be able to login
    fixtures = ['users', 'blog_posts']

    # optional: default extra_environ for this TestCase
    extra_environ = {'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE': 'ru'}

    def testBlog(self):
        # pretend to be logged in as user `kmike` and go to the index page
        index = self.app.get('/', user='kmike')

        # All the webtest API is available. For example, we click
        # on a <a href='/tech-blog/'>Blog</a> link, check that it
        # works (result page doesn't raise exceptions and returns 200 http
        # code) and test if result page have 'My Article' text in
        # its body.
        assert 'My Article' in index.click('Blog')

django-webtest provides a django.test.TestCase subclass (django_webtest.WebTest) that creates webtest.TestApp around django wsgi interface and makes it available in tests as self.app.

It also features an optional user argument for self.app.get, self.app.post, etc. to help making authorized requests. This argument should be a django.contrib.auth.models.User instance or a string with user's username for the user who is supposed to be logged in. To log out again, call self.app.reset, clearing all cookies. To make a bunch of calls with the same user, call app.set_user(user) before your requests; if you want to disable that user, call app.get(..., user=None) for one request or app.set_user(None) to unset the user for all following calls.

For 500 errors original traceback is shown instead of usual html result from handler500.

You also get the response.templates and response.context goodness that is usually only available if you use Django's native test client. These attributes contain a list of templates that were used to render the response and the context used to render these templates. All of Django's native asserts ( assertFormError, assertTemplateUsed, assertTemplateNotUsed, assertContains, assertNotContains, assertRedirects) are also supported for WebTest responses.

The session dictionary is available via self.app.session, and has the same content than Django's native test client.

Unlike Django's native test client CSRF checks are not suppressed by default so missing CSRF tokens will cause test fails (and that's good).

If forms are submitted via WebTest forms API then all form fields (including CSRF token) are submitted automagically:

class AuthTest(WebTest):
    fixtures = ['users.json']

    def test_login(self):
        form = self.app.get(reverse('auth_login')).form
        form['username'] = 'foo'
        form['password'] = 'bar'
        response = form.submit().follow()
        self.assertEqual(response.context['user'].username, 'foo')

However if forms are submitted via raw POST requests using app.post then csrf tokens become hard to construct. CSRF checks can be disabled by setting csrf_checks attribute to False in this case:

class MyTestCase(WebTest):
    csrf_checks = False

    def test_post(self):
        self.app.post('/')

When a subclass of Django's TransactionTestCase is desired, use django_webtest.TransactionWebTest.

For disabling CSRF checks in a pytest-django fixture, see Usage with PyTest.

All of these features can be easily set up manually (thanks to WebTest architecture) and they are even not neccessary for using WebTest with Django but it is nice to have some sort of integration instantly.

See http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/webtest/ for API help. Webtest can follow links, submit forms, parse html, xml and json responses with different parsing libraries, upload files and more.

Integration with django-rest-framework

If your project uses django-rest-framework, the setting REST_FRAMEWORK['AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES'] will be patched automatically to include a class that links the rest-framework authentication system with app.get(user=user).

Usage with PyTest

You need to install pytest-django:

$ pip install pytest-django

Then you can use django-webtest's fixtures:

def test_1(django_app):
    resp = django_app.get('/')
    assert resp.status_code == 200, 'Should return a 200 status code'

We have a django_app_factory fixture we can use to create custom fixtures. For example, one that doesn't do CSRF checks:

# conftest.py

@pytest.fixture
def csrf_exempt_django_app(django_app_factory):
    return django_app_factory(csrf_checks=False)

csrf_checks and extra_environ are the only arguments to django_app_factory.

Why?

While django.test.client.Client is fine for its purposes, it is not well-suited for functional or integration testing. From Django's test client docstring:

This is not intended as a replacement for Twill/Selenium or the like - it is here to allow testing against the contexts and templates produced by a view, rather than the HTML rendered to the end-user.

WebTest plays on the same field as twill. WebTest has a nice API, is fast, small, talks to the django application via WSGI instead of HTTP and is an easy way to write functional/integration/acceptance tests. django-webtest is able to provide access to the names of rendered templates and template context just like native Django TestClient.