Web development fun with Lettuce and Django

Django is a awesome web framework, very mature, aims for simplicity and the best of all: it’s fun to use it.

To make it even more fun, lettuce has built-in support for Django.

Getting started

1. install the lettuce django app

Pick up any Django project, and add lettuce.django in its settings.py configuration file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.admin',

    # ... other apps here ...
    'my_app',
    'foobar',
    'another_app',
    'lettuce.django', # this guy will do the job :)
)

Considering the configuration above, let’s say we want to write tests for the my_app django application.

2. create the feature directories

Lettuce will look for a features folder inside every installed app:

/home/user/projects/djangoproject
     | settings.py
     | manage.py
     | urls.py
     | my_app
           | features
                - index.feature
                - index.py
     | foobar
           | features
                - carrots.feature
                - foobar-steps.py
     | another_app
           | features
                - first.feature
                - second.feature
                - many_steps.py

3. write your first feature

@index.feature:

Feature: Rocking with lettuce and django

    Scenario: Simple Hello World
        Given I access the url "/"
        Then I see the header "Hello World"

    Scenario: Hello + capitalized name
        Given I access the url "/some-name"
        Then I see the header "Hello Some Name"

@index-steps.py:

from lettuce import *
from lxml import html
from django.test.client import Client
from nose.tools import assert_equals

@before.all
def set_browser():
    world.browser = Client()

@step(r'I access the url "(.*)"')
def access_url(step, url):
    response = world.browser.get(url)
    world.dom = html.fromstring(response.content)

@step(r'I see the header "(.*)"')
def see_header(step, text):
    header = world.dom.cssselect('h1')[0]
    assert header.text == text

4. run the tests

Once you install the lettuce.django app, the command harvest will be available:

user@machine:~projects/djangoproject $ python manage.py harvest

The harvest command executes the django.test.utils.setup_test_environment function before it starts up the Django server. Typically, invoking this function would configure Django to use the locmem in-memory email backend. However, Lettuce uses a custom Django email backend to support retrieving email from Lettuce test scripts. See Checking email for more details.

5. specifying feature files

The harvest command accepts a path to feature files, in order to run only the features you want.

Example:

user@machine:~projects/djangoproject $ python manage.py harvest path/to/my-test.feature

6. grab actual example code

In order to assure that lettuce integrate well with Django, it have a set of integration tests, there are a actual Django project running with lettuce.

You can grab the code at the alfaces folder of lettuce git repository

Technical details

If you want to write acceptance tests that run with web browsers, you can user tools like twill, selenium, webdriver and windmill

red-tape-less builtin server

Lettuce cleverly runs an instance of the built-in Django HTTP server in the background. It tries to bind the HTTP server at localhost:8000 but if the port is busy, it keeps trying to run in higher ports: 8001, 8002 and so on until it reaches the maximum port number 65535.

Note

You can override the default starting port from “8000” to any other port you want.

To do so, refer to “running the HTTP server in other port than 8000” below.

So that you can use browser-based tools such as those listed above to access Django.

Warning

When running the http server, lettuce sets the environment variables SERVER_NAME and SERVER_PORT. It was brought for a GAE issue. If it can possibly bring any errors, be warned.

figure out django urls

As the Django HTTP server can be running in any port within the range 8000 - 65535, it could be hard to figure out the correct URL for your project, right?

Wrong!

Lettuce is here for you. Within your steps you can use the django_url utility function:

from lettuce import step, world
from lettuce.django import django_url

@step(r'Given I navigate to "(.*)"')
def navigate_to_url(step, url):
    full_url = django_url(url)
    world.browser.get(full_url)

what does django_url do ?!?

It prepends a Django-internal URL with the HTTP server address.

In other words, if lettuce binds the http server to localhost:9090 and you call django_url with "/admin/login":

from lettuce.django import django_url
django_url("/admin/login")

It returns:

"http://localhost:9090/admin/login"

terrain also available in django projects

At this point you probably know how terrain.py works, and it also works with Django projects.

You can setup environment and stuff like that within a terrain.py file located at the root of your Django project.

Taking the very first example of this documentation page, your Django project layout would like like this:

/home/user/projects/djangoproject
     | settings.py
     | manage.py
     | urls.py
     | terrain.py
     | my_app
           | features
                - index.feature
                - index.py
     | foobar
           | features
                - carrots.feature
                - foobar-steps.py
     | another_app
           | features
                - first.feature
                - second.feature
                - many_steps.py

Notice the terrain.py file at the project root, there you can populate the world and organize your features and steps with it :)

Checking email

When you run your Django server under lettuce, emails sent by your server do not get transmitted over the Internet. Instead, these emails are added to a multiprocessing.Queue object at lettuce.django.mail.queue.

Example:

from lettuce import step
from lettuce.django import mail
from nose.tools import assert_equals


@step(u'an email is sent to "([^"]*?)" with subject "([^"]*)"')
def email_sent(step, to, subject):
    message = mail.queue.get(True, timeout=5)
    assert_equals(message.subject, subject)
    assert_equals(message.recipients(), [to])

Running without HTTP server

Sometimes you may just do not want to run Django’s built-in HTTP server running in background, in those cases all you need to do is run the harvest command with the --no-server or -S option.

Example:

python manage.py harvest --no-server
python manage.py harvest -S

running the HTTP server in other port than 8000

If you face the problem of having lettuce running on port 8000, you can change that behaviour.

Before running the server, lettuce will try to read the setting LETTUCE_SERVER_PORT which must be a integer

Example:

LETTUCE_SERVER_PORT = 7000

This can be really useful if 7000 is your default development port, for example.

running the HTTP server with settings.DEBUG=True

In order to run tests against the nearest configuration of production, lettuce sets up settings.DEBUG=False

However, for debug purposes one can face a misleading HTTP 500 error without traceback in Django. For those cases lettuce provides the --debug-mode or -d option.

python manage.py harvest --debug-mode
python manage.py harvest -d

using the test database

If you want to use a test database by default, instead of a live database, with your test server you can specify the -T flag or set the following configuration variable in settings.py.

LETTUCE_USE_TEST_DATABASE = True

running only the specified scenarios

You can also specify the index of the scenarios you want to run through the command line, to do so, run with --scenarios or -s options followed by the scenario numbers separated by commas.

For example, let’s say you want to run the scenarios 4, 7, 8 and 10:

python manage.py harvest --scenarios=4,7,8,10
python manage.py harvest -s 4,7,8,10

to run or not to run? That is the question!

During your development workflow you may face two situations:

running tests from just certain apps

Lettuce takes a comma-separated list of app names to run tests against.

For example, the command below would run ONLY the tests within the apps myapp and foobar:

python manage.py harvest --apps=myapp,foobar

# or

python manage.py harvest --a  myapp,foobar

You can also specify it at settings.py so that you won’t need to type the same command-line parameters all the time:

LETTUCE_APPS = (
    'myapp',
    'foobar',
)
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'my_app',
    'foobar',
    'another_app',
    'lettuce.django',
)

running tests from all apps, except by some

Lettuce takes a comma-separated list of app names which tests must NOT be ran.

For example, the command below would run ALL the tests BUT those within the apps another_app and foobar:

python manage.py harvest --avoid-apps=another_app,foobar

You can also specify it at settings.py so that you won’t need to type the same command-line parameters all the time:

LETTUCE_AVOID_APPS = (
    'another_app',
    'foobar',
)

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'my_app',
    'foobar',
    'another_app',
    'lettuce.django',
)