Django: set cookie on test client?

Question

My Django site is set up with some middleware that on each request, checks for a cookie, and if it is not set, forwards the user elsewhere.

I now want to run some tests on the site. This is my code:

def test_contactform(self):
    response = self.client.get('/contact/')
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
    print response
    self.assertTrue('Contact me' in response.content)

Unfortunately, this fails with:

Vary: Cookie
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: http://testserver/ldap/?next=/contact/
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tests.py", line 43, in test_contactform
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
AssertionError: 302 != 200

Can I either (i) set a cookie on the Django test client (and if so how) or (ii) require the Django test client to follow the redirect and test against the final page?

Answer 1

None of the above worked for me (Django1.9, Python3.4). Found this solution here:

from django.test import TestCase    
from http.cookies import SimpleCookie


class TestViewWithCookies(TestCase):

    def test_votes(self):
        self.client.cookies = SimpleCookie({'name': 'bla'})
        response = self.client.get('/vote/2')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)

Answer 2

You can set cookies for test client by calling load on cookies attribute which is SimpleCookie object.

from django.core import signing

self.client.cookies.load({
    'example': '123',
    'signed_example': signing.get_cookie_signer('signed_example').sign('123')
})

Django's test client is stateful - will persist cookies between tests and will ignore expire dates. For removal, you need to manually remove cookie or create a new client. - See docs

--- For Python 3 and Django 2+

Answer 3

While the accepted answer is the right approach for this problem, I just want to point out that you can set cookies directly (i.e. approach number (i) as you call it), but not via the test client. Instead you need to use a RequestFactory to construct a request which you can set the cookie on, then pass that directly to the view in question.

So instead of:

response = self.client.get('/contact/')

you do:

request = RequestFactory().get('/contact/')
request.COOKIES['thing'] = 'whatever'
response = contact_view(request)

where contact_view is the view serving /contact/.