Testing in Django

Automated testing is an extremely useful bug-killing tool for the modern Web developer. You can use a collection of tests – a test suite – to solve, or avoid, a number of problems:

  • When you’re writing new code, you can use tests to validate your code works as expected.
  • When you’re refactoring or modifying old code, you can use tests to ensure your changes haven’t affected your application’s behavior unexpectedly.

Testing a Web application is a complex task, because a Web application is made of several layers of logic – from HTTP-level request handling, to form validation and processing, to template rendering. With Django’s test-execution framework and assorted utilities, you can simulate requests, insert test data, inspect your application’s output and generally verify your code is doing what it should be doing.

The best part is, it’s really easy.

Unit tests v. doctests

There are two primary ways to write tests with Django, corresponding to the two test frameworks that ship in the Python standard library. The two frameworks are:

  • Unit tests – tests that are expressed as methods on a Python class that subclasses unittest.TestCase or Django’s customized TestCase. For example:

    import unittest

class MyFuncTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def testBasic(self):
        a = ['larry', 'curly', 'moe']
        self.assertEqual(my_func(a, 0), 'larry')
        self.assertEqual(my_func(a, 1), 'curly')

  • Doctests – tests that are embedded in your functions’ docstrings and are written in a way that emulates a session of the Python interactive interpreter. For example:

    def my_func(a_list, idx):
    """
    >>> a = ['larry', 'curly', 'moe']
    >>> my_func(a, 0)
    'larry'
    >>> my_func(a, 1)
    'curly'
    """
    return a_list[idx]

Which should I use?

Because Django supports both of the standard Python test frameworks, it’s up to you and your tastes to decide which one to use. You can even decide to use both.

For developers new to testing, however, this choice can seem confusing. Here, then, are a few key differences to help you decide which approach is right for you:

  • If you’ve been using Python for a while, doctest will probably feel more “pythonic”. It’s designed to make writing tests as easy as possible, so it requires no overhead of writing classes or methods. You simply put tests in docstrings. This has the added advantage of serving as documentation (and correct documentation, at that!). However, while doctests are good for some simple example code, they are not very good if you want to produce either high quality, comprehensive tests or high quality documentation. Test failures are often difficult to debug as it can be unclear exactly why the test failed. Thus, doctests should generally be avoided and used primarily for documentation examples only.
  • The unittest framework will probably feel very familiar to developers coming from Java. unittest is inspired by Java’s JUnit, so you’ll feel at home with this method if you’ve used JUnit or any test framework inspired by JUnit.
  • If you need to write a bunch of tests that share similar code, then you’ll appreciate the unittest framework’s organization around classes and methods. This makes it easy to abstract common tasks into common methods. The framework also supports explicit setup and/or cleanup routines, which give you a high level of control over the environment in which your test cases are run.
  • If you’re writing tests for Django itself, you should use unittest.

Where to go from here

As unit tests are preferred in Django, we treat them in detail in the Testing Django applications document.

Django and doctests describes Django-specific features when using doctests.

You can also use any other Python test framework, Django provides an API and tools for that kind of integration. They are described in the Using different testing frameworks section of Advanced testing topics.

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