Django doctest framework

Inspired by Hugo’s post A Test Framework for Django and his DjangoTesting framework I wrote ibofobi.utils.test. Another Django test-framework which provides the same features plus request/response testing also, but in a different way that I like better.

The big differences are that I built it on top of doctest instead of unittest and the fixtures are written in YAML not Python code. I think doctest is a lot nicer to work with than the Java’ish unittest module; and YAML is good for simple data-structures such as the fixtures. Also, I implemented simple request/response tests on top of Beautiful Soup, which is so cool I almost cannot belive it :). Also, the tests are run in an in-memory sqlite database, inspired by Ian Maurer’s Django Unit Testing post.

To test an application you first create a fixtures directory and put your fixtures in there as *.yml, for example in ibofobi/apps/blog/fixtures/blog.yml I have:

posts:
    hello_world:
        title: Hello, World!
        slug: hello-world
        posted: 1979-7-7 23:12:00.0
        listed: true
        content: A lot of content should go here.

The fixtures are grouped by model-name and each fixture has a name, which you can use in the doctests to refer to the database-object. When you have some fixtures you create a tests module for your doctests, so in ibofobi/apps/blog/tests/__init__.py I have:

"""
>>> hello_world.title
'Hello, World!'
"""

This asserts that the title of the post created from the fixture hello_world has the expected title. Now, I want to test that the month-archive view works, so I also have this in the tests-module:

"""
>>> browser.go('/archive/1979/07/')
>>> browser.soup.li.a.string
'Hello, World!'
"""

The browser object is a helper which invokes the Django handler and parses the result with BeautifulSoup.

If you want to try ibofobi.utils.test get it with:

git clone http://mel.ibofobi.dk/~sune/r/ibofobi.git

And run the django-test script, which will run tests in each application in INSTALLED_APPS. Both PyYAML and BeautifulSoup are bundled, so you don’t have to install the separately.

Alas, the tests are always run in an in-memory sqlite database, so you will need sqlite working for Django. I will fix this wart so the tests can be run with other database-backends in one-shot databases like with django/tests/runtests.py.