How can I set up a small test harness for Python CGI script? I don't want to run a server in order to test it, but I do want to supply various GET/POST inputs for my test.
It appears to me that FieldStorage (or the object behind it) is utterly immutable, so I don't see how to supply the CGI data on the fly in a harness.
You could use a mocking library, such as Mock to do the job. For example, suppose you want to test the function_to_test
function from your CGI script, you could write a unittest class like this:
import unittest
import cgi
from mock import patch
def function_to_test():
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
if "name" not in form or "addr" not in form:
return "<H1>Error</H1>\nPlease fill in the name and address.\n"
text = "<p>name: {0}\n<p>addr: {1}\n"
return text.format(form["name"].value, form["addr"].value)
@patch('cgi.FieldStorage')
class TestClass(unittest.TestCase):
class TestField(object):
def __init__(self, value):
self.value = value
FIELDS = { "name" : TestField("Bill"), "addr" : TestField("1 Two Street") }
def test_cgi(self, MockClass):
instance = MockClass.return_value
instance.__getitem__ = lambda s, key: TestClass.FIELDS[key]
instance.__contains__ = lambda s, key: key in TestClass.FIELDS
text = function_to_test()
self.assertEqual(text, "<p>name: Bill\n<p>addr: 1 Two Street\n")
def test_err(self, MockClass):
instance = MockClass.return_value
instance.__contains__ = lambda self, key: False
text = function_to_test()
self.assertEqual(text,
"<H1>Error</H1>\nPlease fill in the name and address.\n")
If I run this code as a unit test I get:
..
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.003s
OK
In case you do not want to use an extra library such as Mock: it is possible to set up a cgi.FieldStorage
object with some test data. The Python3 example below assumes that you expect a POST
input:
import unittest
from io import BytesIO
class TestForm(unittest.TestCase):
def setUp(self):
"""
Makes a cgi.FieldStorage object
with some bogus fields.
"""
# provide a byte string with the parameters
# using the format b"name1=value1&name2=value2..."
urlencode_data = b"firstname=Joe&lastname=Bloggs&email=joe.bloggs@company.com"
urlencode_environ = {
'CONTENT_LENGTH': str(len(urlencode_data)),
'CONTENT_TYPE': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
'QUERY_STRING': '',
'REQUEST_METHOD': 'POST',
}
data = BytesIO(urlencode_data)
data.seek(0)
self.fs = cgi.FieldStorage(fp=data, environ=urlencode_environ)
# unit test methods come here
# form fields are accessible via `self.fs`
The idea comes from https://bugs.python.org/file9507/cgitest.py. There you can find other interesting examples, e.g. forms with file upload etc.
Note that the __init__
method of cgi.FieldStorage
is undocumented, or at least I could not find it in the current cgi module documentation.