django-shotgun 0.2

A Django application for testing entire sites.

django-shotgun

Created by Stephen McDonald

django-shotgun is a Django application that provides the ability to validate HTTP status codes across your entire Django application. django-shotgun consists of two parts, a management command called load_shotgun that prepares django-shotgun with a snapshot of your database to use in the Django test case, and the test case itself which spiders your Django site testing for valid HTTP status codes for every URL it finds.

Installation

Assuming you have pip installed, the easiest method is to install directly from pypi by running the following command:

$ pip install -U django-shotgun

Otherwise you can check out the source directly and install it via:

$ python setup.py install

Once installed you can then add django_shotgun to your INSTALLED_APPS.

Shotgun Loading

django-shotgun is most effective when used in conjunction with real data. This is in contrast to the approach a Django test case will take where it purposely does not use the project’s real database to run tests. django-shotgun deals with this by providing a management command called load_shotgun which dumps the contents of your database to a fixture called shotgun.json. Under the hood, load_shotgun extends the built-in dumpdata command and supports the same options, with one extra option called path which allows you to define where the fixture file should be saved to:

$ python manage.py load_shotgun --path=/path/to/fixtures/

If the path option is omitted, the fixture file will be saved to the root of the current project.

Shotgun Firing

The django-shotgun test case is a standard Django test case and can therefore be run by calling the built-in test management command:

$ python manage.py test

The django-shotgun test case will first test the URL / and parse URLs found in <a> tags from the resulting response. It then continues this process for each URL it finds until all URLs have been tested. <form> tags and their field elements are also parsed and each form is tested with both a GET and POST, first without any field data and then with test values for each form field. The test case will fail if any response has a status code other than 200.

Configuration

The following settings can be defined in your project’s settings module to control the behaviour of django-shotgun.

• SHOTGUN_EXCLUDE_APPS - A list of app names to exclude when generating the shotgun fixtures file. Defaults to [].

• SHOTGUN_EXCLUDE_URLS - A list of URLs to exclude from checking. Defaults to [].

• SHOTGUN_FIXTURE_NAME - The name of the fixture file that will be saved and loaded from. Defaults to shotgun.json.

• SHOTGUN_FIXTURE_PATH - The path to where the fixture file will be saved and loaded from. Defaults to the project’s root directory.

• SHOTGUN_ROOT_URL - The first URL that the test case will request. Defaults to /.