Getting live_server fixture with Django test working

Question

I would like to use pytest, pytest-django, and pytest-selenium together to test my Django application functionality. If I start the server manually with python manage.py runserver, and manually input the URL, it works fine.

The live_server fixture from pytest-django is supposed to start a server process in the background that I could use, but it's not working. Instead of a passing test, I get "The requested resource was not found on this server."

Here are the relevant sections of my files:

pytest.ini

[pytest]
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = chatsite_api.settings.test
addopts = --liveserver localhost:8080  --cov=. --cov-report=html --driver Firefox

test_pages.py

import pytest

def test_homepage(selenium, live_server):
    selenium.get(live_server.url)
    assert "Django: the Web framework" in selenium.title

And chatsite_api.settings.test.py

from .dev import *  # NOQA

DATABASES = {"default": {"ENGINE": "django.db.backends.sqlite3", "NAME": ":memory:"}}

DEBUG = True

As I said, the tests run fine when I start the server myself, but the live_server fixture doesn't seem to be doing what it's supposed to. I have verified that the live_server.url is being set according to the addopts line in pytest.ini, but that is as far as I've gotten.

Answer 1

If you are testing against the default index page (the one with the "The install worked successfully! Congratulations!" greeting), it is only shown when running the development server with DEBUG = True. In particular, it won't be present in tests. If you want to use the view, you need to explicitly configure it in urls module like the other views:

# urls.py
from django.urls import path
from django.views.debug import default_urlconf


urlpatterns = [
    path('', default_urlconf, name='index'),
]