This directory contains tests for the plugin's Python backend. The test suite uses the pytest framework. Since Kolibri is ultimately a Django application, it also requires pytest-django to handle Django configuration and access. Additionally, a small pytest plugin is used to coordinate the initialization of Kolibri and Django.
See the pytest getting started for the basics of writing and running tests. In addition to pytest basics, fixtures and marks are important pytest features for configuring the testing context. Pytest provides several built-in fixtures as well as the ability to define custom fixtures.
As mentioned above, Kolibri is a Django application. Parts of the plugin that interact with Django such as database models require additional configuration to work properly. Django provides several components to handle this configuration. However, since Django's components are based on unittest, pytest-django provides equivalents for pytest style testing.
For example, any tests using a Django model will require access to the
Django database. When using pytest-django, the easiest way to provide
this access is to add the @pytest.mark.django_db decorator to the test
function. This starts a database transaction for each test and then
discards the transaction at the end of the test so that the database is
reset. This is much faster than flushing the database after each test.
See the pytest-django database access
documentation for more details.
pytest-django also provides helpers to replace
the Django testing tools. For example, the
client fixture will provide a Django test
client for the test to make HTTP requests without
actually starting the Django server.
When testing database models, it's useful to preload the database
tables. Django refers to this as fixture
loading. While Django's unittest derived test
classes have built-in support for loading database fixtures, this needs
to be performed manually with the loaddata command with pytest tests.
The command can be called with Django's call_command function. For
example:
import pytest
from django.core.management import call_command
from ..models import MyModel
@pytest.mark.django_db
def test_my_model():
call_command("loaddata", "test-data.json")
assert MyModel.objects.count() == 3
By default, loaddata searches for fixtures in each app's fixtures
directory. Database fixtures can be prepared with the dumpdata
management command, which can be executed with kolibri manage dumpdata.