Adding tests to the Django REST framework tutorial

Question

I'm trying to replace an existing function-based view using the login_required decorator with a Django REST framework API using a ModelViewSet. However, it seems like the authentication works a bit differently.

In order to try to adapt my unit tests to the Django REST framework case, I cloned https://github.com/encode/rest-framework-tutorial and added a tests.py at the top level directory:

import json

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.test import TestCase, Client

from snippets.models import Snippet

class SnippetTestCase(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.username = 'john_doe'
        self.password = 'foobar'
        self.user = User.objects.create(username=self.username, password=self.password)

        self.client = Client()
        self.snippet = Snippet.objects.create(owner=self.user, code="Foo Bar")

    def test_1(self):
        self.client.login(username=self.username, password=self.password)
        response = self.client.post(
                path='http://localhost:8000/snippets/1/',
                data=json.dumps({'code': 'New code'}),
                content_type="application/json")
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 201)

However, this returns a 403 Forbidden response:

Kurts-MacBook-Pro:rest-framework-tutorial kurtpeek$ python manage.py test
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
F
======================================================================
FAIL: test_1 (tutorial.tests.SnippetTestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/kurtpeek/Documents/source/rest-framework-tutorial/tutorial/tests.py", line 23, in test_1
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 201)
AssertionError: 403 != 201

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.049s

FAILED (failures=1)
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...

On the other hand, using HTTPie with the -a flag works fine:

Kurts-MacBook-Pro:rest-framework-tutorial kurtpeek$ http -a kurtpeek:foobar123 POST http://localhost:8000/snippets/ code="print 123"
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Allow: GET, POST, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Length: 212
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:11:59 GMT
Location: http://localhost:8000/snippets/2/
Server: WSGIServer/0.2 CPython/3.6.4
Vary: Accept, Cookie
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

{
    "code": "print 123",
    "highlight": "http://localhost:8000/snippets/2/highlight/",
    "id": 2,
    "language": "python",
    "linenos": false,
    "owner": "kurtpeek",
    "style": "friendly",
    "title": "",
    "url": "http://localhost:8000/snippets/2/"
}

It seems to me like this test should fulfill the requirements of the IsOwnerOrReadonly permissions class:

from rest_framework import permissions


class IsOwnerOrReadOnly(permissions.BasePermission):
    """
    Custom permission to only allow owners of an object to edit it.
    """

    def has_object_permission(self, request, view, obj):
        # Read permissions are allowed to any request,
        # so we'll always allow GET, HEAD or OPTIONS requests.
        if request.method in permissions.SAFE_METHODS:
            return True

        # Write permissions are only allowed to the owner of the snippet.
        return obj.owner == request.user

because the same User is also the owner of the snippet. Any ideas why this is not working, or how I could construct test cases that do pass?

Answer 1

I found out that the Django REST framework has its own set of testing tools. For now, I'm subclassing from rest_framework.test.APITestCase instead of django.test.TestCase, and calling the .force_authenticate method on the thus created self.client:

import json

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.test import TestCase

from rest_framework.test import APITestCase, force_authenticate

from snippets.models import Snippet

class SnippetTestCase(APITestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.username = 'john_doe'
        self.password = 'foobar'
        self.user = User.objects.create(username=self.username, password=self.password)
        self.client.force_authenticate(user=self.user)

    def test_1(self):
        response = self.client.post('/snippets/', {'code': 'Foo Bar'}, format='json')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 201)

The test now passes.