Welcome to django-selenium’s documentation!

Django ≥1.4 note

Django 1.4 got built-in selenium support, and you can continue to use django-selenium with it, while keeping the same shortcut webdriver functions. How to use django-selenium on django 1.4:

  • specify preferred webdriver in the SELENIUM_DRIVER setting
  • create test classes subclassing the SeleniumLiveTestCase inside the standard tests.py file.

What is it?

Django-selenium is a library that provides seamless integration for Django framework with a Selenium testing tool. Additionally it provides syntactic sugar for writing and maintaining selenium tests (see MyDriver class section).

It allows to write and execute selenium tests just as normal ones.

Dependencies

How to use it

Define selenium specific settings in your settings.py file.

Local

Local run in this case means that you’re using Firefox, Chrome or IE driver, and therefore you don’t need running selenium server, because these drivers work with the browsers directly.

So, if you plan to use selenium locally, then you should define the following settings:

  • Set SELENIUM_DISPLAY if you plan to run selenium tests on display other than “:0” (on VNCServer/Xvfb for example). See settings.py for other settings available.
  • Set SELENIUM_DRIVER for corresponding browser driver in selenium.
  • Optionally, set SELENIUM_DRIVER_OPTS as a dictionary with options to be passed to the selenium webdriver. This option can be used for instance to pass a custom firefox profile path to be used, or a custom path for chromedriver. See the Selenium webdriver’s drivers page for more information.

Remote

  • Set SELENIUM_DRIVER = 'Remote' in your settings file.
  • Set SELENIUM_CAPABILITY to the desired value.
  • Probaly set SELENIUM_PATH to point to the selenium-server.jar on your system, for example /home/dragoon/selenium-server-2.6.jar. This setting is required if you want to start selenium server along with tests. You don’t need this if you keep your selenium server running using other methods.
  • Set SELENIUM_HOST to point to the IP/hostname of your remote selenium server.
  • Set SELENIUM_TESTSERVER_HOST to the IP address/hostname of the machine where test server is running (e.g. 192.168.1.2).

See settings.py file to see some examples.

Common

  1. Set TEST_RUNNER = 'django_selenium.selenium_runner.SeleniumTestRunner' or subclass SeleniumTestRunner to make your own test runner with extended functionality.

  2. Write some selenium tests for your apps in a module seltests.py. Subclass selenium tests from django_selenium.testcases.SeleniumTestCase.

  3. Add custom management command to override default test command:

    from django_selenium.management.commands import test_selenium

class Command(test_selenium.Command):

    def handle(self, *test_labels, **options):
        super(Command, self).handle(*test_labels, **options)

    Place it somewhere in your app in management/commands/test.py (don’t forget the __init__.py files in each directory)

  1. Run manage.py test like you normally do. Now you have two extra options: --selenium and --selenium-only. First runs selenium-specific tests after the usual ones, the last runs only selenium tests.

And that’s it.

To see the integration in action, check out the test application included in the source.

Django Jenkins

There is also a special test runner to execute selenium tests using django-jenkins integration: django_selenium.jenkins_runner.JenkinsTestRunner.

You can specify this class for JENKINS_TEST_RUNNER setting, and manage.py jenkins command will also execute selenium tests and generate reports for them.

MyDriver class

MyDriver class from django_selenium.testcases offers extended functionality on top of selenium.webdriver.remote.webdriver.WebDriver class.

This class contains a number of convenient shortcuts to handle frequently used operations described below:

South

You use South to migrate your applications ? Ok, south is also overriding the django test commands, therefore you will need to modify your custom management command as follows:

from django_selenium.management.commands import test_selenium
from south.management.commands import test as test_south

class Command(test_south.Command, test_selenium.Command):

   def handle(self, *test_labels, **options):
       super(Command, self).handle(*test_labels, **options)

In addition, you need to set the following:

  • SOUTH_TESTS_MIGRATE = False in your test_settings.py
  • if you called your command “test” (test.py), then the app containing your command should come after the “south” in the INSTALLED_APPS list.