C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2010 17:22:06 -0400

I've been looking at how best to test a Django project with Selenium.

For some background on Selenium see my earlier posts:
  - http://www.acooke.org/cute/SeleniumWe0.html
  - http://www.acooke.org/cute/SeleniumTe0.html

Now I want to add tests to a Django based web service.  Django supports
defining and running tests (including defining database contents with
fixtures), but a Selenium test also requires that the application be running
and connected to the database.

The latest Django version (1.2) included new support for both extending how
tests run and for having more than one database configured.  Unfortunately
that means that most third party testing libraries are currently broken
(especially if you do configure more than one database).

After looking around, I found that the "sane Django testing" package seemed to
be the best choice (the developer's first language isn't English, and it's a
one-person project, which worried me, but he's been great with support and the
documentation, while brief, makes a lot of sense).

  http://devel.almad.net/docs/django-sane-testing/index.html
  http://devel.almad.net/trac/django-sane-testing/
  http://github.com/Almad/django-sane-testing

For example, it includes nose support (in fact, you need to have nose
installed, even if you're not using it) which should (haven't tried it yet)
make selecting what tests to run a lot simpler.

To get the full 1.2 support you currently need to checkout a branch:
  git clone http://github.com/Almad/django-sane-testing.git sane
  cd sane
  git checkout -b multidb origin/multidb

Then you add djangosanetesting to Python's path and add a test to your Django
project.  For example, create a "tests" directory in an app and then, in
there, a file containing a test that subclasses SeleniumTestCase

  from djangosanetesting.cases import SeleniumTestCase

  class TestSeleniumGoogle(SeleniumTestCase):

      def test_login(self):
	  self.selenium.open('/login')

Note how this includes the "selenium" attribute, just as with the Java testing
I described earlier.

Next, separately download Selenium and start it up.  I decided to use the
alpha 2 release:
  java -jar selenium-2.0a5/selenium-server-standalone-2.0a5.jar

And add a few extra lines to settings.py:
  TEST_RUNNER = 'djangosanetesting.testrunner.run_tests'
  FORCE_SELENIUM_TESTS = True
  SELENIUM_BROWSER_COMMAND = "*firefox"
(the "force" gives better errors when getting started).

With that, the following will run the test:
  PATH=/usr/lib64/firefox:$PATH
  PYTHONPATH=... python manage.py test --verbosity=2 myapp
(the path fix I described in an earlier post - it gives Selenium access to the
Firefox binary instead of a startup script).

It's not fast, because it needs to build the test databases, start the
application, and call out to the Selenium server, but it works.  Sweet!

Andrew