06: Functional Testing with WebTest

Write end-to-end full-stack testing using webtest.

Background

Unit tests are a common and popular approach to test-driven development (TDD). In web applications, though, the templating and entire apparatus of a web site are important parts of the delivered quality. We'd like a way to test these.

WebTest is a Python package that does functional testing. With WebTest you can write tests which simulate a full HTTP request against a WSGI application, then test the information in the response. For speed purposes, WebTest skips the setup/teardown of an actual HTTP server, providing tests that run fast enough to be part of TDD.

Objectives

• Write a test which checks the contents of the returned HTML

Steps

1. First we copy the results of the previous step, as well as install the webtest package:

   $ cd ..; cp -r unit_testing functional_testing; cd functional_testing
   $ $VENV/bin/python setup.py develop
   $ $VENV/bin/easy_install webtest
   

2. Let's extend functional_testing/tutorial/tests.py to include a functional test:

   import unittest
   
   from pyramid import testing
   
   
   class TutorialViewTests(unittest.TestCase):
       def setUp(self):
           self.config = testing.setUp()
   
       def tearDown(self):
           testing.tearDown()
   
       def test_hello_world(self):
           from tutorial import hello_world
   
           request = testing.DummyRequest()
           response = hello_world(request)
           self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
   
   
   class TutorialFunctionalTests(unittest.TestCase):
       def setUp(self):
           from tutorial import main
           app = main({})
           from webtest import TestApp
   
           self.testapp = TestApp(app)
   
       def test_hello_world(self):
           res = self.testapp.get('/', status=200)
           self.assertIn(b'<h1>Hello World!</h1>', res.body)
   

   Be sure this file is not executable, or nosetests may not include your tests.

3. Now run the tests:

   $ $VENV/bin/nosetests tutorial
   .
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Ran 2 tests in 0.141s
   
   OK
   

Analysis

We now have the end-to-end testing we were looking for. WebTest lets us simply extend our existing nose-based test approach with functional tests that are reported in the same output. These new tests not only cover our templating, but they didn't dramatically increase the execution time of our tests.

Extra Credit

1. Why do our functional tests use b''?