Werkzeug

Test Utilities

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Quite often you want to unittest your application or just check the output from an interactive python session. In theory that is pretty simple because you can fake a WSGI environment and call the application with a dummy start_response and iterate over the application iterator but there are argumentably better ways to interact with an application.

Diving In

Werkzeug provides an object called Client which you can pass a WSGI application (and optionally a response wrapper) which you can use to send virtual requests to the application.

A response wrapper is a callable that takes three arguments: the application iterator, the status and finally a list of headers. The default response wrapper returns a tuple. Because response objects have the same signature you can use them as response wrapper, ideally by subclassing them and hooking in test functionality.

>>> from werkzeug import Client, BaseResponse, test_app
>>> c = Client(test_app, BaseResponse)
>>> resp = c.get('/')
>>> resp.status_code
200
>>> resp.headers
Headers([('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8')])
>>> resp.response_body.splitlines()[:2]
['<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"',
 '  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">']

Or here without wrapper defined:

>>> from werkzeug import Client, test_app
>>> c = Client(test_app)
>>> app_iter, status, headers = c.get('/')
>>> status
'200 OK'
>>> headers
[('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8')]
>>> ''.join(app_iter).splitlines()[:2]
['<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"',
 '  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">']

Available Functions

The following functions are available:

open(path, base_url, query_string, **options)

Takes the same arguments as the create_environ function from the utility module with some additions.

The first parameter should be the path of the request which defaults to '/'. The second one can either be a absolute path (in that case the url host is localhost:80) or a full path to the request with scheme, netloc port and the path to the script.

If the path contains a query string it will be used, even if the query_string parameter was given. If it does not contain one the query_string parameter is used as querystring. In that case it can either be a dict, MultiDict or string.

The following options exist:

method
The request method. Defaults to GET
input_stream
The input stream. Defaults to an empty read only stream.
data

The data you want to transmit. You can set this to a string and define a content type instead of specifying an input stream. Additionally you can pass a dict with the form data. The values could then be strings (no unicode objects!) which are then url encoded or file objects.

A file object for this method is either a file descriptor with an additional name attribute (like a file descriptor returned by the open / file function), a tuple in the form (fd, filename, mimetype) (all arguments except fd optional) or as dict with those keys and values.

Additionally you can instanciate the werkzeug.test.File object (or a subclass of it) and pass it as value.

content_type
The content type for this request. Default is an empty content type.
content_length
The value for the content length header. Defaults to 0.
errors_stream
The wsgi.errors stream. Defaults to sys.stderr.
multithread
The multithreaded flag for the WSGI Environment. Defaults to False.
multiprocess
The multiprocess flag for the WSGI Environment. Defaults to False.
run_once
The run_once flag for the WSGI Environment. Defaults to False.
get(...)
Like open() but enforces GET as method.
post(...)
Like open() but enforces POST as method.
head(...)
Like open() but enforces HEAD as method.
put(...)
Like open() but enforces PUT as method.
delete(...)
Like open() but enforces DELETE as method.