RedRover

UNDER DEVELOPMENT - RedRover is not ready for production use and is made available for the curious only.

RedRover is a behavior-driven testing utility suite for Django. It wraps other powerful tools such as Nose and Selinium into a clean readable syntax that is easy to use.

At its core, RedRover borrows from other python projects and provides an interface with custom syntax sugar inspired by the RSpec and Capybara projects that are used widely with Ruby on Rails.

Requirements

• Python 2.7+ (Django is on the fast-track to 3.0 and so am I)
• Django 1.4+ (tested with all micro-releases of 1.4)

Installation

Install via pip.

$ pip install redrover

Dependencies

These will be automatically installed for you.

• django_nose
• rednose
• splinter

It is also highly recommended that you install and use FactoryBoy. While not strictly required to run RedRover, it is a very nice compliment to RedRover's operation and is used in many of the examples.

Configuration

Add 'redrover' to the bottom of your INSTALLED_APPS. Also add the following configuration to your settings.py:

TEST_RUNNER = 'redrover.RedRoverRunner'

Usage

No big changes here:

$ python manage.py test

Since RedRover wraps nose (via django_nose), you get all of its testing options as well. See their documentation for details, or just run python manage.py help test.

Writing Tests

The idea of writing RedRover tests is to identify a particular "thing" and describe how it should behave. Every thing gets a class where it becomes the 'subject,' and every class has one or more tests that evaluate the subject's behavior by referring to "it."

To accomplish this, we declare a subject in the class description, and further define it in the setUp method.

Model Tests

Suppose we decide to describe the behavior of a "Person" Django model. One of the qualities of Person might be that it has a first_name, or in other words, that it responds to a first_name attribute inquiry. Here is what this sort of "behavior-driven" test might look like when using RedRover:

from redrover import *

from people.models import Person


class PersonTest(RedRoverTest):

  subject = 'person'

  def setUp(self):
    self.person = Person()

  @describe
  def attributes(self):
    it.should(respond_to, 'first_name')

Running ./manage.py test should result in some nice looking output that informs you all tests have passed.

Now let's take it a step further. Suppose you want to ensure that your model instance properly validates when populated with correct information -- and moreso, that it doesn't validate when populated with incorrect information. Assume the model Person looks something like this:

from django.db import models


class Person(models.Model):
  first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
  last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

  @property
  def full_name(self):
    return '%s %s' % (self.first_name, self.last_name)

Using RedRover, we can fully test this model's behavior like so:

from redrover import *

from people.models import Person


class PersonTest(RedRoverTest):

  subject = 'person'

  def setUp(self):
    self.person = Person(first_name='Bob', last_name='Smith')

  @describe
  def attributes(self):
    it.should(respond_to, 'first_name')
    it.should(respond_to, 'last_name')
    it.should(respond_to, 'full_name')
    its('full_name').should(equal, "Bob Smith")

    it.should(be_valid)

  @describe
  def when_first_name_is_blank(self):
    self.person.first_name = ""
    it.should_not(be_valid)

  @describe
  def when_last_name_is_blank(self):
    self.person.last_name = ""
    it.should_not(be_valid)

Page Tests

A.k.a "view/template" tests, here we'll identify the "page" as the subject and define how it should look/behave as we do things to it. Here's an example:

from redrover import *


class PagesTest(RedRoverTest):

  subject = page

  @before
  def setUp(self):
    visit('/')

  @describe
  def the_homepage(self):
    its('title').should(be, 'Homepage')
    it.should(have_text, 'Welcome')

  @describe
  def navigating_to_the_people_index(self):
    click_link('People')
    its('title').should(be, 'People')
    it.should(have_selector, 'h1', text='People')

You are not completely restricted to writing tests in this way. The standard unittest library and assertions work as good as ever; and they may be preferable in some cases. Where RedRover really shines is in behavior-driven developement.