Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Overview of this book

Bugs are a time consuming burden during software development. Django's built-in test framework and debugging support help lessen this burden. This book will teach you quick and efficient techniques for using Django and Python tools to eradicate bugs and ensure your Django application works correctly. This book will walk you step by step through development of a complete sample Django application. You will learn how best to test and debug models, views, URL configuration, templates, and template tags. This book will help you integrate with and make use of the rich external environment of test and debugging tools for Python and Django applications. The book starts with a basic overview of testing. It will highlight areas to look out for while testing. You will learn about different kinds of tests available, and the pros and cons of each, and also details of test extensions provided by Django that simplify the task of testing Django applications. You will see an illustration of how external tools that provide even more sophisticated testing features can be integrated into Django's framework. On the debugging front, the book illustrates how to interpret the extensive debugging information provided by Django's debug error pages, and how to utilize logging and other external tools to learn what code is doing.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Problems of integration


Why is integration of Django testing with other tools even an issue? Consider the case of wanting to use the nose test framework. It provides its own command, nosetests, to find and run tests in a project tree. However, attempting to run nosetests, instead of manage.py test, in a Django project tree quickly reveals a problem:

kmt@lbox:/dj_projects/marketr$ nosetests 
E 
====================================================================== 
ERROR: Failure: ImportError (Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined.) 
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/nose-0.11.1-py2.5.egg/nose/loader.py", line 379, in loadTestsFromName 
    addr.filename, addr.module) 
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/nose-0.11.1-py2.5.egg/nose/importer.py", line 39, in importFromPath 
    return self.importFromDir(dir_path, fqname...