Testing in Django§

Testing Django§

There are Unit Tests and there are Integration tests
Unit Tests should not rely on external services
Unit Tests should be fast

Writing a Unit Test§

Django bundles unittest2 as django.utils.unittest

          import django.http
import django.utils.unittest as unittest2

class LocaleMiddlewareTests(unittest2.TestCase):

    def test_request_not_processed(self):

        middleware = LocaleMiddle()
        response = django.http.HttpResponse()
        middleware.process_response(none, response)

        self.assertFalse(response.cookies)

Test Client§

Django TestClient acts like a browser. Sort of.
Allows you to make a request against your application and inspect the response
The TestClient is slow (compared to plain unit tests)

          from django.test.client import Client

c = Client()

response = c.get('/login')
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)

response = c.post('/login/', {'username': 'john', 'password': 'smith'})

Request Factory§

Django 1.3 introduced RequestFactory, with an API similar to Test Client
Easy way to generate Request objects, which can be passed to views
Note that middleware is not run on these Requests

Running Tests§

Django only looks in apps with models.py for tests

$ ./manage.py test

Easy to replace the test runner with something like nose if you so desire

Further Reading§