django-webtest is an app for instant integration of Ian Bicking's WebTest (http://webtest.pythonpaste.org/) with django's testing framework.
$ pip install webtest $ pip install django-webtest
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.
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.
Development happens at github and bitbucket:
The issue tracker is at bitbucket.
Feel free to submit ideas, bugs, pull requests (git or hg) or regular patches.
Make sure tox is installed and run
$ tox
from the source checkout.