DRF Test

DRF Test is a minimal testing library that aims to facilitate writing DRY tests for django rest framework views. It also [optionally] generates good looking API documentations based on tests it runs.

One thing that usually becomes bothering about documentations is that they need to be kept up to date and keeping them up to date takes a lot of effort from development teams and more often than not we tend to not keep them up to date and they eventually lose their value. With DRF Test API docs will be generated based on your tests. So as long as your tests pass and your code is working, you can be sure that your docs are also up to date!

Installation

Run pip install drftest. Also Make sure you use python >= 3.4.0.

Links

DRF Test can be accessed using:

• Pypi: https://pypi.org/project/drftest/
• Repo exemplifying how to use DRF Test: https://github.com/pdrum/drftest_example
• Documentation demo: https://drftest.netlify.com/

Preparation

In order to use DRF Test initially you need to take the following four steps:

• Add drftest to your list of INSTALLED_APPS like:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'drftest',
]

• Add TEST_RUNNER = 'drftest.TestRunner' to your settings.py file.

• DRF Test has an interface called AuthProvider which can be imported with from drftest import AuthProvider and looks like

class AuthProvider:
    @abstractmethod
    def set_auth(self, api_client: APIClient, user):
        """
        Authenticates user using the given `api_client`
        """
        raise NotImplementedError()

    def get_auth_headers(self, user):
        """
        Returns a dictionary indicating what headers need to be set for authentication
        purpose of given user.
        It is only used in docs.
        """
        return {}

In order to use DRF Test you need to make a class that inherits from AuthProvider and implements its two abstract methods. Then you need to tell DRFTest where your auth provider lives. For example if the class is called MyAuthProvider and resides in a module called my_auth_provider at the root of your project, you should add the following line to your settings.py file:

DRF_TEST_AUTH_PROVIDER_CLASS = 'my_auth_provider.MyAuthProvider'

• Optionally you can set value of a special variable called DRF_TEST_DOCS_DIR in your settings if you do so, then DRF Test will create a nice documentation in the directory specified by DRF_TEST_DOCS_DIR. In this documentation DRF Test will demonstrate what the input and output is for each of your APIs under test. If this variable is not set DRF Test will avoid creating docs after tests are run. It's also a good idea to let DRF_TEST_DOCS_DIR be a directory under root of your django project so that it is kept track of using VCS under the same repository as the rest of your code.

Writing your first test

DRF Test is not just about generating docs but it also helps you not repeat yourself while writing tests for your django views. Writing tests using DRF Test is not much different from writing simple django tests except for a few simple things.

Your test classes should extend either BaseViewTest or BaseAuthenticatedViewTest and implement their abstract methods. Each test class tests only a single url which is handled by methods of a view class.

For BaseViewTest (from drftest import BaseViewTest) you override the following two methods:

@abstractmethod
def _make_url(self, kwargs=None):
    """
    :param kwargs: path parameters in a form which can get passed to django's 
    reverse function 
    :return: url which is being tested. (Most probably generated using django's reverse 
    function)
    """
    raise NotImplementedError()
 
 
@abstractmethod
def _get_view_class(self):
    """
    :return: The view class which is being tested. For example if MyAwsomeView is being
    tested, this method should look like `return MyAwsomeView` 
    """
    raise NotImplementedError

Also for tests where the url being tested has some path parameters you should override the following method as well. (It defaults to returning None.)

def _get_default_url_kwargs(self):
    """
    :return: A dictionary where the keys are name of path parameters and the values
    are their default values. It doesn't matter if the values are not meaningful
    defaults. The output is just used by tests generated by drftest which check
    whether or not things like url mapping, etc are working and your view is working.
    """
    return None

In case the view class being tested has some permission_classes your tests can inherit BaseAuthenticatedViewTest (from drftest import BaseAuthenticatedViewTest) instead of BaseViewTest. This way you should also override a fourth method which looks like:

@abstractmethod
def _get_permission_classes(self):
    """
    Should return a list of permission classes. drftest generates a testcase to check if
    result of calling this method matches those specified by `permission_classes` attribute
    of your class. This way you can test your permission classes separately and in other
    tests just use drftest's auto-generated testcases to check if correct permissions are set.  
    """
    raise NotImplementedError()

Finally whenever you need to make a request use self._get_for_response, self._post_for_response, self._put_for_response, self._head_for_response or self._patch_for_response. Here's what each of their parameters does (None of them are required. They all have default values.):

• User is user of the request. User will be authenticated using AuthProvider you wrote earlier. If user is not given, request will be sent using an anonymous user.
• data is body of requests (in case of things like POST) or query parameters (in case of things like GET or DELETE that do not have a body.)
• url_kwargs is a dictionary specifying path parameters to use.
• format defaults to json. Can also be set to multipart. Docs will not get generated for multipart requests.
• docs is a boolean whether or not the request should appear in docs and defaults to True
• extra [as kwargs] Headers can be passed as kwargs.

Using generated docs

Docs are generated to be used with mkdocs. Installing it takes only a single command. After installing it you can use mkdocs serve to run the docs and then visit them at http://localhost:8000. You can also generate a static website out of it very easily. For more information visit mkdocs.

Here's how you can install mkdocs onn mac and ubuntu respectively.

brew install mkdocs
sudo apt-get install mkdocs-doc

Advantages

• You will not repeat things like writing url of test, name of class being tested, authentication mechanism for user sending requests in your tests, etc in each and every test.
• Tests of your view will all look quite similar even if multiple people are working on them simultaneously.
• Docs will get generated from your tests.