django-webtest 1.0.1

Instant integration of Ian Bicking's WebTest (http://pythonpaste.org/webtest/) with django's testing framework.

django-webtest is an almost trivial app for instant integration of Ian Bicking’s WebTest (http://pythonpaste.org/webtest/) with django’s testing framework.

Installation

$ pip install webtest
$ pip install django-webtest

or

$ easy_install webtest
$ easy_install django-webtest

or grab latest versions from bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org/ianb/webtest, http://bitbucket.org/kmike/django-webtest)

Usage

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

It also features optional user argument for self.app.get and self.app.post methods to help making authorized requests. This argument should be django.contrib.auth.models.User’s username for user who is supposed to be logged in.

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.

from django_webtest import WebTest

class MyTestCase(WebTest):

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

    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
        # it's body.
        assert 'My Article' in index.click('Blog')

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

Why?

While django.test.client.Client is fine for it’s 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 nice API, is fast, small, talk to django application via WSGI instead of HTTP and is an easy way to write functional/integration/acceptance tests.

Twill is also a great tool and it also can be easily integrated with django (see django-test-utils package) and I also enjoy it much. But I prefer WebTest over twill because twill is old (last release is in 2007), communicate via HTTP instead of WSGI (though there is workaround for that), lacks support for non-latin text (not to mention unicode) and have a much larger codebase to hack on. Twill however understands HTML better and is more mature so consider it (and django-test-utils package) if WebTest doesn’t fit for some reason.