pytest-localserver 0.3.5

py.test plugin to test server connections locally.

pytest-localserver is a plugin for the pytest testing framework which enables you to test server connections locally.

Sometimes monkeypatching urllib2.urlopen() just does not cut it, for instance if you work with urllib2.Request, define your own openers/handlers or work with httplib. In these cases it may come in handy to have an HTTP server running locally which behaves just like the real thing [1]. Well, look no further!

Quickstart

Let’s say you have a function to scrape HTML which only required to be pointed at a URL

import requests
def scrape(url):
    html = requests.get(url).text
    # some parsing happens here
    # ...
    return result

You want to test this function in its entirety without having to rely on a remote server whose content you cannot control, neither do you want to waste time setting up a complex mechanism to mock or patch the underlying Python modules dealing with the actual HTTP request (of which there are more than one BTW). So what do you do?

You simply use pytest’s funcargs feature and simulate an entire server locally!

def test_retrieve_some_content(httpserver):
    httpserver.serve_content(open('cached-content.html').read())
    assert scrape(httpserver.url) == 'Found it!'

What happened here is that for the duration of your tests an HTTP server is started on a random port on localhost which will serve the content you tell it to and behaves just like the real thing.

The added bonus is that you can test whether your code behaves gracefully if there is a network problem:

def test_content_retrieval_fails_graciously(httpserver):
    httpserver.serve_content('File not found!', 404)
    pytest.raises(ContentNotFoundException, scrape, httpserver.url)

The same thing works for SMTP servers, too:

def test_sending_some_message(smtpserver):
    mailer = MyMailer(host=smtpserver.addr[0], port=smtpserver.addr[1])
    mailer.send(to='[e-mail]', from_='[e-mail]',
        subject='MyMailer v1.0', body='Check out my mailer!')
    assert len(smtpserver.outbox)==1

Here an SMTP server is started which accepts e-mails being sent to it. The nice feature here is that you can actually check if the message was received and what was sent by looking into the smtpserver’s outbox.

It is really that easy!

Available funcargs

Here is a short overview of the available funcargs. For more details I suggest poking around in the code itself.

httpserver

provides a threaded HTTP server instance running on localhost. It has the following attributes:

• code - HTTP response code (int)

• content - content of next response (str)

• headers - response headers (dict)

Once these attribute are set, all subsequent requests will be answered with these values until they are changed or the server is stopped. A more convenient way to change these is

httpserver.serve_content(content=None, code=200, headers=None)

The server address can be found in property

• url

which is the string representation of tuple server_address (host as str, port as int).

If you want to check which form fields have been POSTed, Try

httpserver.serve_content(..., show_post_vars=True)

which will display them as parsable text.

httpsserver

is the same as httpserver only with SSL encryption.

smtpserver

provides a threaded instance of smtpd.SMTPServer runnning on localhost. It has the following attributes:

• addr - server address as tuple (host as str, port as int)

• outbox - list of email.message.Message instances received.

Using your a WSGI application as test server

As of version 0.3 you can now use a WSGI application to run on the test server

from pytest_localserver.http import WSGIServer

def simple_app(environ, start_response):
    """Simplest possible WSGI application"""
    status = '200 OK'
    response_headers = [('Content-type', 'text/plain')]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return ['Hello world!\n']

def pytest_funcarg__testserver(request):
    """Defines the testserver funcarg"""
    server = WSGIServer(application=simple_app)
    server.start()
    request.addfinalizer(server.stop)
    return server

def test_retrieve_some_content(testserver):
    assert scrape(testserver.url) == 'Hello world!\n'

Have a look at the following page for more information on WSGI: http://wsgi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/learn.html

Download and Installation

You can install the plugin by running

pip install pytest-localserver

Alternatively, get the latest stable version from PyPI or the latest bleeding-edge archive from bitbucket.org.

License and Credits

This plugin is released under the MIT license. You can find the full text of the license in the LICENSE file.

Copyright (C) 2010-2013 Sebastian Rahlf and others (see AUTHORS).

Some parts of this package is based on ideas or code from other people:

• I borrowed some implementation ideas for the httpserver from linkchecker.

• The implementation for the SMTP server is based on the Mailsink recipe by Adam Feuer, Matt Branthwaite and Troy Frever.

• The HTTPS implementation is based on work by Sebastien Martini.

Thanks guys!

Development and future plans

Feel free to clone the repository and add your own changes. Pull requests are always welcome!:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/basti/pytest-localserver

If you find any bugs, please file a report.

Test can be run with tox. Note that you need virtualenv<1.8 to run tests for Python 2.4.

I already have a couple of ideas for future versions:

• support for FTP, SSH (maybe base all on twisted?)

• making the SMTP outbox as convenient to use as django.core.mail.outbox

• add your own here!

---

[1]

The idea for this project was born when I needed to check that a piece of software behaved itself when receiving HTTP error codes 404 and 500. Having unsuccessfully tried to mock a server, I stumbled across linkchecker which uses a the same idea to test its internals.