Your new Django site need tests. Nothing super fancy, just enough that you know you've not forgotten to close some <div> somewhere and it's not going to start 500ing next time you deploy. You could write unit tests, but those are boring and your client sure as hell isn't going to pay for the time.
You've got five minutes, though.
- Simple
- Iterates through a list of URLs and complains if any of them 500.
- Magic
- Will loudly complain when there are views missing from the list of URLs to test.
- Has what you need
- Comes with optional test mixins for checking links and validating HTML, JSON or your spelling.
- Extensible
- Easily add tests that will run against every view on your website. If you want tests for things like consistent capitalisation of a particular phrase or the universal inclusion of a particular meta tag, you can have them in minutes.
- Portable
- Tested on Python 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4 with Django 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7.
Changes made in each release are listed in tags in this repository.
pip install django-instant-coverage
You'll want a tests module somewhere. I keep mine in my PROJECT_DIR
, because
it's testing the whole site and not just one app. Wherever you put it, it
should be named such that your test runner will find it (tests.py
usually
works well) and should contain at least the following:
from django.test import TestCase
from instant_coverage import InstantCoverageMixin
class EverythingTest(InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase):
pass
With that in place, you should be able to run your tests with python manage.py test
. They'll fail, though. You'll get a list of URLs you've not told it to
test, looking something like this:
AssertionError: The following views are untested:
('^',) ^$ (index)
('^admin/',) ^$ (index)
('^admin/',) ^logout/$ (logout)
('^admin/',) ^password_change/$ (password_change)
[...]
It'll probably contain a bunch of URLs you don't want to test, though, like
those from the Django admin app. To quickly exclude entire URL includes, add
tuples like the ones shown in the failure you just got to your test's
uncovered_includes
attribute:
class EverythingTest(InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase):
uncovered_includes = [
('^admin/',),
]
Add paths matching the URLs that you do actually want to test to
covered_urls
, and add paths that match those you don't to uncovered_urls
.
If you forget what's still missing, run the tests again to get an audit of
what's left.
class EverythingTest(InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase):
covered_urls = [
'/',
'/api/',
'/0007C3F2760E0541/',
]
uncovered_urls = [
# requires stuff to be in the session
'/upload/confirm/',
'/shortlist-selection/',
# only accepts POST
'/shortlist-order/',
# probably tested pretty thoroughly by the django project
'/media/woof.jpg',
]
If you want to use reverse()
rather than hard-code URLs or if you want to
test more than one path for a given URL, that is fully supported. Encouraged,
even. It doesn't matter how you build it, as long as covered_urls
is a list.
If you have views that you can't test without data present in the database, make a fixtures file and add it to your test class.
By default, Instant Coverage will make sure none of your views raise unhandled exceptions and all of them return status codes between 200 and 399. There's a good chance at least some of the provided optional mixins will be appropriate for your website, so be sure to have a look through them and see what strikes your fancy. Use them like this:
from instant_coverage import InstantCoverageMixin, optional
class EverythingTest(
optional.Spelling, optional.ExternalLinks, optional.ValidHTML5,
InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase
):
# covered_urls, etc...
InstantCoverageMixin
provides an instant_responses
method that returns a
dictionary of Django test client Response
objects keyed by URL.
Test methods you write should iterate across that. Have a look at the optional
mixins for some examples.
If you make any that you think might be useful to any other websites, even if a minority, a pull request would be very much appreciated.
If you want to test all the URLs you've listed under different circumstances
(for instance, when a user is logged in or when a different language has been
selected), create a subclass of your tests and override setUp()
. For
instance, you might put the following below your EverythingTest
:
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
class LoggedInEverythingTest(EverythingTest):
def setUp(self):
super(LoggedInEverythingTest, self).setUp()
user = get_user_model()(
username='user',
is_staff=True,
is_superuser=True,
)
user.set_password('pass')
user.save()
self.assertTrue(self.client.login(username='user', password='pass'))
Be aware that, by default, the test client will follow redirects. If you do not
want this, set the follow_redirects
attribute of your tests to False
.
If you have a bunch of test classes that test the same collection of URLs, you
may want to consider inheriting from InstantCoverageAPI
instead of
InstantCoverageMixin
; the former will not run any tests that you don't
explicitly add yourself.