Testing

The code base includes two distinct sets of tests. One is based on the default Django testing framework. There’s a known issue with these tests whereby it’s not possible to use Django test client to simulate HTTP requests. The other set of tests is based on Lettuce, a Python BDD testing tool. The recommended way to test HTTP requests is to use Lettuce.

Classic Django tests

You can run these tests with this command:

python manage.py test

By default, they run against a PostgreSQL database, which can be quite slow. If you wish to speed up execution of these tests, you can run the test suite against an in-memory SQLite database by adding something like this after your database definition in your site_settings.py:

import sys
if 'test' in sys.argv:
    DATABASES['default'] = {'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3'}

However please be aware that the team has experienced differences of behaviors between running the tests against a PostgreSQL database and a SQLite database. By precaution, fefore publishing your changes you should run the tests with PostgreSQL.

Lettuce BDD behaviors

The set of Lettuce behaviors can be executed with this command:

python manage.py harvest

By default this will start a built-in webserver and you might notice that the command never returns. You can terminate it with Control-C. In order to avoid this issue you can disable the built-in server with the -S switch:

python manage.py harvest -S

You can run behaviors only for a specific app with a command such as:

python manage.py harvest -S apps/member/features