django-webtest 1.7.7

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

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

Installation

$ pip install webtest
$ 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
        # it's body.
        assert 'My Article' in index.click('Blog')

django-webtest provides 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 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.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 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 content as 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.

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://webtest.pythonpaste.org/ for API help. Webtest 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 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.

Contributing

Development happens at github and bitbucket:

• https://github.com/kmike/django-webtest

• https://bitbucket.org/kmike/django-webtest

The issue tracker is at bitbucket.

Feel free to submit ideas, bugs, pull requests (git or hg) or regular patches.

Running tests

Make sure tox is installed and run

$ tox

from the source checkout.

CHANGES

1.7.7 (2014-03-25)

• Fix installation for Python 3.x on systems with C locales.

1.7.6 (2014-01-20)

• DjangoTestApp methods pass all custom keyword arguments to webtest.TestApp; this allows to use xhr=True feature (thanks Max Kharandziuk).

• Travis CI testing fixes (thanks Darian Moody).

1.7.5 (2013-07-17)

• OPTIONS method is fixed;

• added workaround for DELETE method warnings (see https://github.com/Pylons/webtest/issues/50).

1.7.4 (2013-07-14)

• Really add TransactionWebTest base class (thanks Julien Aubert).

1.7.3 (2013-07-07)

• Added support for PATCH and OPTIONS HTTP methods (thanks Will Bradley).

1.7.2 (2013-06-27)

• TransactionWebTest base class is added (thanks Iurii Kriachko).

1.7.1 (2013-06-11)

• Added support for non-ascii usernames.

1.7 (2013-05-23)

• Added support for django 1.6 (thanks Carl Meyer).

1.6.1 (2013-03-31)

• Added support for django 1.5+ custom user models (thanks Gautier Hayoun).

1.6 (2013-03-07)

• Added ability to pass a custom response_class and app_class to WebTest (thanks Bruno Renié);

• Added case-insensitive header access in DjangoWebtestResponse (thanks Bruno Renié).

1.5.7 (2013-02-27)

• WebTest 2.0 support.

1.5.6 (2013-01-21)

• django 1.5 support: transaction handling is fixed (thanks Marco Braak).

1.5.5 (2013-01-14)

• Fixed django 1.5 support: DjangoWebtestResponse.streaming attribute is added (thanks David Winterbottom).

1.5.4 (2012-09-13)

• fix django 1.5 issues with AdminMediaHandler (thanks Tai Lee);

• tox.ini is updated to use latest django versions and the official trunk with python3 support;

• django 1.5 SimpleCookie issues are fixed.

1.5.3 (2012-04-25)

• self.assertRedirects is fixed for authenticated requests.

1.5.2 (2012-04-01)

• if AuthenticationMiddleware is not in a middleware list, WebtestUserMiddleware is put to the end of middlewares in order to provide better backward compatibility with 1.4.x in case of custom auth middlewares.

1.5.1 (2012-03-22)

• Fixed handling of forms with method=”get”. Thanks Jeroen Vloothuis.

1.5 (2012-02-24)

• WebtestUserMiddleware is inserted after AuthenticationMiddleware, not to the end of middleware list (thanks bigkevmcd);

• don’t list python 2.5 as supported because WebOb dropped 2.5 support;

• python 3 support;

• test running using tox.

1.4.4 (2012-02-08)

• ‘user’ parameter for self.app.put and self.app.delete methods (thanks Ruslan Popov).

1.4.3 (2011-09-27)

• The django session dictionary is available via self.app.session.

1.4.2 (2011-08-26)

• REMOTE_ADDR is now '127.0.0.1' by default. This is how standard django’s test client behave.

  Please note that this can slow tests down and cause other side effects if django-debug-toolbar 0.9.x is installed+configured and INTERNAL_IPS contain '127.0.0.1' because debug toolbar will become turned on during tests. The workaround is to remove django-debug-toolbar middleware during tests in your test settings:

  DEBUG_MIDDLEWARE = 'debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware'
  if DEBUG_MIDDLEWARE in MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:
      MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.remove(DEBUG_MIDDLEWARE)

1.4.1 (2011-06-29)

• self.renew_app() method for resetting the ‘browser’ inside tests.

1.4 (2011-06-23)

• Better auth implementation;

• support for assertRedirects, assertContains and assertNotContains.

1.3 (2010-12-31)

• Django 1.3 compatibility: test responses are now having ‘templates’ attribute;

• Django 1.3 compatibility: the way exceptions are handled is changed;

• auto_follow parameter for app.get method (redirect chains will be auto-followed with auto_follow=True).

1.2.1 (2010-08-24)

• REMOTE_USER authorization can be disabled.

1.2 (2010-08-21)

• response.template and response.context goodness (thanks Gregor Müllegger);

• tests (thanks Gregor Müllegger);

• csrf checks are now optional (thanks Gregor Müllegger).

1.1.1 (2010-07-16)

• User instance can be passed to get and post methods instead of user’s username.

1.1 (2010-06-15)

• Original traceback instead of html 500 error page;

• per-TestCase extra_environ (thanks Gael Pasgrimaud);

• fixed a bug with app.post parameters (thanks anonymous).

1.0 (2010-04-20)

Initial release (thanks Ian Bicking for WebTest).