django-webtest 1.2.1

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

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

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 = {'REMOTE_ADDR': '10.20.30.1'}

    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')

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 instance or a string with user’s username for user who is supposed to be logged in.

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

You also get the response.template 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.

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)
        login_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('/')

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://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.

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)

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 unicode and have a much larger codebase to hack on. django-webtest also is able to provide access to the names of rendered templates and template context just like native django TestClient. Twill however understands HTML better and is more mature so consider it if WebTest doesn’t fit for some reason.