2014-12-21 Unit test a Flask application
It is usually quite annoying to develop a web application and to test the code by just running it and checking it produces what you expect for a given request. It would be more simple to write a function which launches the web application on a local machine and retrieves the content of a given page. That describes what a unit test could be used for.
I used Flask to do it. I hesitated to choose bottle but I needed to be able to shutdown the application by some means. I found a way for Flask faster than for Bottle. That's why I used the first one.
The code the wep application can be found here: simple_flask_site.py. The first trick is to be able to shutdown the service:
def shutdown_server():
func = request.environ.get('werkzeug.server.shutdown')
if func is None:
raise RuntimeError('Not running with the Werkzeug Server')
func()
@app.route('/shutdown/', methods=['POST'])
def shutdown():
shutdown_server()
return Text2Response('Server shutting down...')
And you do it with:
import requests c = requests.post( "http://localhost:8025/shutdown/")
The second trick is after the web application has started, another thread must continue to query the website. So we run the website within a thread:
from ensae_teaching_cs.td_1a.simple_flask_site import app th = FlaskInThread(app, host="localhost", port=8025) th.start() # just run app.run # ... any kind of test requests.post( "http://localhost:8025/shutdown/")
| <-- --> |
Xavier Dupré
|
