Introduction to Python/Django tests: Fixtures

In the first two posts of this series, we talked about how to get the basic infrastructure for your tests up and running. You should have a file with doc tests and one with unit tests. They should be linked into your django project with an file. If you were feeling adverterous you may have even added some real content to them. Today we’re going to start going down the road of getting some data into your tests.

This post will cover fixtures. Fixtures are how you create a state for your database in your tests. This will be my first post in the comparison between Unit tests and Doc tests. I will focus on fixtures, but some other differences between the two may become relevant throughout the post, and I will address them in turn.

How to create a fixture

Fixtures can go into a couple places, but generally it is a good idea to put them in your applications fixtures/ directory. This makes all of your test data self contained inside your app, so it can be run when it is distributed. The loaddata command discussed further down specifies where fixtures can be placed to be loaded, if you’re curious.

Before we go about trying to figure out how to use fixtures, we need to know how to make them. Django’s docs on this are pretty good. Basically if you have an app that has data in the database, you can use the ./ dumpdata <app> command to create a fixture from the current data in the database. It’s handy to note that you can use the --format tag to specify the output format, and the --indent command to make the output prettier. My preferred command is

#This assumes you are at the project level, right above your app.
#and that APP/fixtures/ exists
./ dumpdata APP --format=yaml --indent=4 > APP/fixtures/APP.yaml

This makes for a really nice, readable fixture, so if you need to edit it later you can. Go ahead and run this command in your project directory, substituting your app in the appropriate places. Open the fixture if you want and take a peak inside. It should be a nice readable version of your database, serialized into Yaml. Note: If you don’t have PyYAML installed, it will say that your serialization format isn’t valid, sudo apt-get install python-yaml gets you the package on Ubuntu. If not, you can remove the format option and it will default to JSON.

Testing your fixtures (how meta of us!)

Django also comes with a really neat tool to be able to test and update fixtures. The testserver command allows you to run the development server, passing a fixture to load before it launches. This allows you to run your code base against the fixture that you have, in a browser.

This seems really nice, but the killer feature of this command is that it keeps the database around after you kill the development server. This means that you can load up a fixture, edit it in the admin or frontend, and then kill the server; then run dumpdata against that database and get your updated fixture back out. Pretty neat! Note, your normal database name will be prefixed with test_, so it doesn’t overwrite your normal DB. This is the one you want to get data out of. (You may have to define it in your file to get dumpdata to use it. This seems like a little bit of a hack, and maybe something could be done to make this easier.)

Fixtures in Doc tests

In what will become a recurring trend, doing fixtures in Doc tests is a hack. Doc tests are made to be a simple answer to a relatively simple problem, and fixtures aren’t a huge deal for them. So a lot of the functionality that we get for free with Unit tests, has to be hacked into Doc tests. I will just show how to do the basic things, because implementing anything beyond that isn’t very useful for any of us.

>>> from import call_command
>>> call_command("loaddata", "' + 'fixturefile.json' + '", verbosity=0)

In this snippet you are basically calling it the way it is called within Django. Normally when you are using loaddata, you would be calling it as ./ loaddata FIXTURE. . Note that the loaddata docs talk about how to use loaddata normally. There are a couple of downsides to this method; The test is very fragile, if the fixture breaks, all of your tests fail. Also, you can really only call one fixtures at a time because there is no setUp and tearDown that will make sure your environment is the same for every test. Doing things this way just makes writing tests a whole lot harder. It is indeed a hack, and one that shouldn’t really be used unless you have a very good reason.

Generally in Doc tests, you would create your content as if you were on the command line. This shows how doc tests are generally limited in their scope. You go ahead and create the objects that you care about in the test explicitly, and then run your tests against them. A simple example:

>>> from mine.models import Site
>>> s = Site.objects.create(url='', query='test', title='test', content='lots of stuff')
>>> s.query
>>> pk_site =
>>> Site.objects.get(pk=pk_site)
<Site: test>
>>> Site.objects.get(pk=pk_site).delete()

This tests creating, retrieving and deleting an object. Not a lot of functionality, but if anything inside of the model saving code breaks you will know about it.

Django’s Testcase

The fixture story in Unit tests is much better, as you would expect. However, before we go into how Unit tests use fixtures, there is something that I need to explain. Because of the fact that Unit tests are classes, they can be subclassed just like any other Python class. This means that Django has provided it’s own Testcase class that we can inherit from and get some nice extra Django functionality. The official docs has it really well documented.

You’ll notice that Django’s Testcase has a section for the Test Client and URLConf configuration. We can safely skip those for the moment because they are geared towards testing views. The relevant sections for us at the moment are the Fixture loading and Assertions. I recommend that you actually read the entire testing doc, it isn’t that long, and is packed full of useful information. However, knowing about all of the Assertions that are available to you will make testing a little bit easier.

Fixtures in Unit Tests

The big thing that the Django Testcase does for you in regards to fixtures is that it maintains a consistent state for all of your tests. Before each test is run, the database is flushed: returning it to a pristine state (like after your first syncdb). Then your fixture gets loaded into the DB, then setUp() is called, then your test is run, then tearDown() is called. Keeping your tests insulated from each other is incredibly important when you are trying to make a good test suite. Having tests altering each others data, or having tests that depend on another test altering data are inherently fragile.

Now lets talk about how you’re actually going to use these fixtures. We’re going to go ahead and recreate the simple doc test above. It simply loads up a Site object into the database, checks for some data in it, then deletes it. The fixture handling will handle all of the loading and deleting for us, so all we need to worry about is testing our logic! This makes the test a lot easier to read, and makes its intention a lot clearer.

from django.test import TestCase
from mine.models import Site

class SiteTests(TestCase):
    #This is the fixture:
    #-   fields: {content: lots of stuff, query: test, title: test, url: ''}
    #pk: 1
    fixtures = ['mine']

    def testFluffyAnimals(self):
        s = Site.objects.get(pk=1)
        self.assertEquals(s.query, 'test')
        s.query = 'who cares'

As you can see, this test is a lot simpler than the above one. It is also neat that we can edit the object and save it, and it doesn’t matter. No other tests (if they existed) would be effected by this change. Notice that in my fixtures list, I only had mine and not mine.yaml or mine.json. It you don’t add a file extension to your fixture, it will search for all fixtures with that name, of any extension. You can define an extension if you only want it to search for those types of fields.

I hope that you can see already how Unit Tests give you a lot more value when working with fixtures than doc tests. Having all of the loading, unloading, and flushing handled for you means that it will be done correctly. Once you get a moderately complicated testing scheme, trying to handle that all yourself inside of a doc test will lead to fragile and buggy code.