Testing for Django

Why They’re Different From Other Applications

Think of all the code you’re going to be testing in a web application. The routes, views, and models all require lots of imports and knowledge about the frameworks being used.

This is similar to the car test at the beginning of the tutorial: you have to start up the car’s computer before you can run a simple test like checking the lights.

Django make this easy for you by providing a test framework based on unittest. You can continue writing tests in the way you’ve been learning but execute them slightly differently.

How to Use the Django Test Runner

The Django startapp template will have created a tests.py file inside your application directory. If you don’t have that already, you can create it with the following contents:

from django.test import TestCase

class MyTestCase(TestCase):
    # Your test methods

The major difference with the examples so far is that you need to inherit from the django.test.TestCase instead of unittest.TestCase. These classes have the same API, but the Django TestCase class sets up all the required state to test.

To execute your test suite, instead of using unittest at the command line, you use manage.py test:

$ python manage.py test

If you want multiple test files, replace tests.py with a folder called tests, insert an empty file inside called __init__.py, and create your test_*.py files. Django will discover and execute these.

More information is available at the Django Documentation Website.