New in version 0.6
Untested code is broken code
The origin of this quote is unknown and, even if it may not be entirely correct, it's not far from the truth. Developing applications without testing makes it hard to improve existing code and developers of untested applications tend to become pretty paranoid. On the contrary, if an application has automated tests, you can make changes and instantly know if anything breaks.
Emmett provides an integrated test client that lets you send requests to your application and test your routes with your favorite testing suite. In this documentation chapter we will use the pytest package, but you can obviously use unittest or whatever package you prefer.
In order to learn how to use the test client, let's return to the bloggy example we saw in the tutorial chapter and write a test to verify that the home page shows "No posts here so far" when we access the index of our application. We can use a fixture of the pytest package to share the client instance between the tests, and write down something like this in a tests.py file:
import pytest
from bloggy import app
@pytest.fixture()
def client():
return app.test_client()
def test_empty_db(client):
rv = client.get('/')
assert 'No posts here so far' in rv.data
Notice that our test function begins with the word test: this allows pytest to automatically identify the method as a test to run.
By using client.get, we can send an HTTP GET request to the application with the given path. The return value will be a ClientResponse object. We can now use the data attribute to inspect the return value (as a string) from the application. In this case, we ensure that 'No posts here so far' is part of the output.
If we run the test suite now, we should see the following output:
> py.test tests.py
============================== test session starts ==============================
platform darwin -- Python 2.7.8 -- py-1.4.26 -- pytest-2.6.4
collected 1 item
tests.py .
=========================== 1 passed in 0.28 seconds ============================
The client object gives you all the methods that will make requests using the matching HTTP methods:
Under the default behavior, the test client will store cookies between requests, so if you make two or more consequent requests with the same client instance, you will be capable of using cookie-related features. If you want to avoid this behavior, you can initialize an instance of the client with the opposite parameter:
client = app.test_client(use_cookies=False)
Also, all the requests won't follow redirects unless you specify it in the specific request method:
client.get('/', follow_redirects=True)
Quite often, you will need to perform tests that depend on the client status. In particular, you may need to access the client session or perform operations depending on the last request. One typical example is the one where you need the client to login before performing other operations.
You have several ways to access the Emmett context objects when running tests. In fact, when you make a request with the test client, you can access the request, response, session and T objects referred to the client in the same way you use them in your application:
from emmett import request, response, session, T
All these objects will be the real objects of the Emmett context, and will change their values every time you make a request with the client.
When you need to preserve those objects between multiple requests, you can use the context property of the ClientResponse object. This property will return an object with request, response, session and T attributes from the request context:
r = client.get('/')
last_session = r.context.session
The test client and its return value both support the with notation. Emmett won't do any action on entering and exiting the code block, but you may like to use this notation:
with client.get('/').context as ctx:
client.post('/', data={'someval': ctx.session.otherval})
When you're using the builtin auth module, you can log in the client in order to have a logged session. The only caveat is that you have to inject the form token due to the CSRF protection. You can write a function like this:
def logged_client():
c = app.test_client()
c.get('/auth/login')
c.post('/auth/login', data={
'email': 'doc@emmettbrown.com',
'password': 'fluxcapacitor',
'_csrf_token': list(session._csrf)[-1]
}, follow_redirects=True)
return c
or using the with notation:
def logged_client():
c = app.test_client()
with c.get('/auth/login').context as ctx:
c.post('/auth/login', data={
'email': 'doc@emmettbrown.com',
'password': 'fluxcapacitor',
'_csrf_token': list(ctx.session._csrf)[-1]
}, follow_redirects=True)
return c
The default database pipe in Emmett will reconnect the database when the request starts and closes the connection when the request ends.
Due to this, if you need to run database operations, you should manually re-establish the connection:
with db.connection():
# your code
and you also need to remember to commit or rollback changes:
db.commit()
db.rollback()