Python HTTP automated testing facility
Project description
py-http-auto-test: Python HTTP automated testing facility
What's this?
This is a simple HTTP testing library for Python.
The main idea is to be able to write simple YAML files that describe a suite of HTTP tests, and then run them either as a standalone script or as a pytest test suite, with the provided conftest.py plugin.
A YAML test suite might look like this:
base_url: https://mysite.example.com
tests:
- url: "/"
description: "Fetch the index page"
match:
status: 200
body:
- "<!DOCTYPE html>"
- url: "/favicon.ico"
description: "Ensure the favicon file is present and served with the correct content type"
match:
headers:
- "content-type: image/x-icon"
status: 200
- ...
Why?
Once upon a time, there was http-cuke which I made as an attempt to free myself of having to write tests. At that time, people believed that BDD/cucumber would enable not-necessarily technical people to write business logic test suites. I have personally never seen this happen.
Instead of making the same mistake again, and learning from the past years of experience testing systems, I tried to write something that:
- makes use of a solid HTTP library: libcurl, pycurl
- covers websockets testing. pycurl doesn't yet
- minimizes the amount of code one needs to write to run a test suite
Some Use-Cases
- When building a new package image/AMI, it's nice to be able to spawn a new instance and get a simple and clear answer to the question: Can I online this instance? Will things work?
- Regression testing a web application
- Live testing of a running system every x minutes
Requirements
See the requirements.txt file for the full list of requirements. The main ones are:
- Python 3.8 or later
- The
libcurl4-openssl-devpackage on Debian-based systems, orlibcurl-develor whatever the equivalent on your system is, required to buildpycurl pycurlversion 7+websocketslibrary to run tests against websockets
Optional Requirements
pytestif you want to run http tests as a pytest test suite
Installation
sudo apt-get update -qq
# You need libcurl to build and install pycurl
sudo apt-get install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev
pip install --upgrade py-http-auto-test
Usage
There are two main ways to use this library:
- standalone
- pytest
Standalone
This distribution provides a http-test-runner.py script (usually installed in /usr/local/bin, or in your virtualenv's bin folder) that can be used to run one or more YAML test files.
Examples:
http-test-runner.py --help
http-test-runner.py --test-file website.yaml
# Run the tests but against an alternative IP address
# (this is similar to `MAP * <ip>` in Chrome or `--connect-to *:*:<ip>` in curl)
http-test-runner.py --test-file website.yaml --target-host 127.0.0.1
The library also supports template variables in the YAML files. This is useful if you want to define a set of tests for your web application, and then run them against different environments, for example:
---
# YAML test file
base_url: "https://{{ hostname }}"
tests:
- url: "/"
description: "Index page exists and it's served correctly"
...
and then:
http-test-runner.py --test-file website.yaml --var "hostname=test.mydomain.com"
The {{ hostname }} variable will be replaced with test.mydomain.com in the test suite.
The template format is jinja2.
pytest
All that was described for the standalone case works also as a pytest test suite. You need to make sure the provided conftest.py plugin is found when you run pytest.
Example:
pytest -v ./test.yaml
If you need to pass on arguments or template variables, you can do so using environment variables prefixed with the string HTTPTEST_, as in:
HTTPTEST_TARGET_HOST="127.0.0.1" HTTPTEST_TEMPLATE_VARS="hostname=test.mydomain.com" pytest -v ./test.yaml
To pass on multiple environment variables, use a space character to separate multiple values, as in:
HTTPTEST_TARGET_HOST="127.0.0.1" HTTPTEST_TEMPLATE_VARS="hostname=test.mydomain.com protocol=https" pytest -v ./test.yaml
Comprehensive Example of a Single Test
An HTTP test has a bunch of attributes, some of which are optional. The following is a semi-complete example:
- url: "/index.html"
description: "Verify that we can correctly download the index page as gzip-compressed response"
headers:
- "accept: text/html"
- "accept-encoding: gzip"
verbose: true # false is the default
http2: true # false (http/1.1) is the default
# Here is where you specify the test requirements
match:
# Response HTTP status must be 200 for the test to pass
# This can also be a list of status codes
status: 200
# Verify that the response matches the following headers.
# Header names will be matched regardless of upper or lower case.
headers:
- "content-type: text/html"
- "content-encoding: gzip"
# Verify that the response body contains the specified string patterns
body:
- "<!DOCTYPE html>"
- "<h1>Hello</h1>"
# Verify that the request took less than 500ms
timing: 500ms
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