Tests

Dissemin’s test suite is run using pytest rather than using Django’s ./manage.py test. Pytest offers many additional features compared to Python’s standard unittest which is used in Django. To run the test suite, you need to install pytest and other packages, mentioned in requirements-dev.txt.

The test suite is configured in pytest.ini, which determines which files are scanned for tests, and where Django’s settings are located.

Some tests rely on remote services. Some of them require API keys, they will fetch them from the following environment variables (or be skipped if these environment variables are not defined):

  • ROMEO_API_KEY
  • ZENODO_SANDBOX_API_KEY required for tests of the Zenodo interface. This can be obtained by creating an account on sandbox.zenodo.org and creating a “Personal Access Token” from there.

Fixtures

Dissemin comes with some fixtures predefined. There are mainly two types:

  1. Fixtures coming from load_test_data
  2. Pure python fixtures in conftest.py

While the first class of fixtures laods a lot of data into the test database, they are not always suitable and little obscur. We encourage you not to use them except it is necessary.

The second class is not yet completed. You find some fixtures in the projects root. You can add more fixtures as you need them. If your fixture is only suitable or interesting for a single app, please use it’s conftest.py.

So, for example, if you need more repositories or with special properties, add the corresponding function into the Dummy class of the fixture repository. If you want to use this new repository often out of the box, add a new fixture, that gets it from the Dummy class as shown with the dummy_repository fixture.

The benefit of the second approach is more control and better extensibility.

We also provide some fixtures in JSON in our folder test_data.

Mocking

Currently we partially use mocking. If you write any new test, please use a proper mocking.

DOIResolver

A common scenario is to fetch a paper by DOI to the database. To do this, you can use Paper.create_by_doi from the paper class. Then you just use the fixture mock_doi and add a JSON file for the doi. You need to use slugified name. You can run the test and check the output, you will see the filename.

HTML-Validation

Dissemin has tests for HTML validation. Usually this validation is done for the English language, but we check for all available languages on Tuesday with Travis CI. For this we use the Nu Markup Checker (VNU).

Your Vagrant should be fine, since we deploy a docker image running at http://localhost:8888. If you do not use Vagrant, make sure to have the VNU server running while your tests are running. You can e.g. do

sudo docker run -it --restart always -p 8888:8888 validator/validator:latest

This way the validator will be up and running after restarting your machine.

To check a page, use the fixture check_html.