Login with code when using LiveServerTestCase with Django

Question

So I have a Selenium functional test suite. I've already tested login/signup functionality in a few tests by navigating the Selenium client to the signup page, entering in a username and password, and then telling Selenium to login with those same credentials. Now I want to test other parts of the "login required" areas of the site without having to tell Selenium to click and enter text into the test browser.

In other words, I would like to use something like this (which I use just fine in my view unit tests):

self.client = Client()  

self.user = User.objects.create_user('temporary', '[email protected]', 'temporary')  

self.user.save()  

self.client.login(username='temporary', password='temporary')

in my Selenium tests so I don't have to repeat the lengthy manual login process in every one of my tests (since I've already tested the login system in earlier tests as I said before)

As of right now, I just copy and paste the 'login flow' Selenium instructions for each of my tests that require login. This causes my tests to take an addition 5-6 seconds each and it makes my function_tests.py file very bloated.

All my Googling has brought me to pages teaching me how to test login with Selenium.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is possible to create a pre-authenticated session cookie in Django 1.8 and pass it to Selenium.

In order to do this, you'll have to:

1. Create a new session in your backend;

2. Produce a cookie with that newly created session data;

3. Pass that cookie to your Selenium webdriver.

The logic of session and cookie creation is shown below:

# create_session_cookie.py

from django.conf import settings

from django.contrib.auth import (

    SESSION_KEY, BACKEND_SESSION_KEY, HASH_SESSION_KEY,

    get_user_model

)

from django.contrib.sessions.backends.db import SessionStore

 

def create_session_cookie(username, password):

 

    # First, create a new test user

    user = get_user_model()

    user.objects.create_user(username=username, password=password)

 

    #  Then using the new user credentials,  create the authenticated session

    session = SessionStore()

    session[SESSION_KEY] = user.pk

    session[BACKEND_SESSION_KEY] = settings.AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS[0]

    session[HASH_SESSION_KEY] = user.get_session_auth_hash()

    session.save()

 

    # Finally, create the cookie dictionary

    cookie = {

        'name': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME,

        'value': session.session_key,

        'secure': False,

        'path': '/',

    }

    return cookie

Now, inside your Selenium tests:

 #selenium_tests.py

# assuming self.webdriver is the selenium.webdriver obj.

from create_session_cookie import create_session_cookie

 

session_cookie = create_session_cookie(

    email='[email protected]', password='top_secret'

)

 

#  to setup Selenium, visit some url in your domain.

# (404 pages load the quickest)

self.driver.get('your-url' + '/404-non-existent/')

 

# add the newly created session cookie to selenium webdriver.

self.driver.add_cookie(session_cookie)

 

# refresh to exchange cookies with the server.

self.driver.refresh()

 

# This time users should present as logged in.

self.driver.get('your-url')

I hope it helps!