django-shotgun

Created by Stephen McDonald <http://twitter.com/stephen_mcd>_

django-shotgun is a Django application that provides the ability to validate HTTP status codes across your entire Django application. django-shotgun consists of two parts, a management command_ called load_shotgun that prepares django-shotgun with a snapshot of your database to use in the Django test case_, and the test case itself which spiders your Django site testing for valid HTTP status codes for every URL it finds.

Installation

Assuming you have pip_ installed, the easiest method is to install directly from pypi by running the following command::

$ pip install -U django-shotgun

Otherwise you can check out the source directly and install it via::

$ python setup.py install

Once installed you can then add django_shotgun to your INSTALLED_APPS.

Shotgun Loading

django-shotgun is most effective when used in conjunction with real data. This is in contrast to the approach a Django test case will take where it purposely does not use the project's real database to run tests. django-shotgun deals with this by providing a management command called load_shotgun which dumps the contents of your database to a fixture called shotgun.json. Under the hood, load_shotgun extends the built-in dumpdata_ command and supports the same options, with one extra option called path which allows you to define where the fixture file should be saved to::

$ python manage.py load_shotgun --path=/path/to/fixtures/

If the path option is omitted, the fixture file will be saved to the root of the current project.

Shotgun Firing

The django-shotgun test case is a standard Django test case and can therefore be run by calling the built-in test management command::

$ python manage.py test

The django-shotgun test case will first test the URL / and parse URLs found in <a> tags from the resulting response. It then continues this process for each URL it finds until all URLs have been tested. <form> tags and their field elements are also parsed and each form is tested with both a GET and POST, first without any field data and then with test values for each form field. The test case will fail if any response has a status code other than 200.

Configuration

The following settings can be defined in your project's settings module to control the behaviour of django-shotgun.

• SHOTGUN_EXCLUDE_APPS - A list of app names to exclude when generating the shotgun fixtures file. Defaults to [].
• SHOTGUN_EXCLUDE_URLS - A list of URLs to exclude from checking. Defaults to [].
• SHOTGUN_FIXTURE_NAME - The name of the fixture file that will be saved and loaded from. Defaults to shotgun.json.
• SHOTGUN_FIXTURE_PATH - The path to where the fixture file will be saved and loaded from. Defaults to the project's root directory.
• SHOTGUN_ROOT_URL - The first URL that the test case will request. Defaults to /.

.. _management command: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#ref-django-admin .. _Django test case: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/#testcase .. _pip: http://www.pip-installer.org/ .. _dumpdata: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#dumpdata-appname-appname-appname-model .. _test: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#test-app-or-test-identifier