Login with code when using LiveServerTestCase with Django

Question

So I have a Selenium functional test suite. I\'ve already tested login/signup functionality in a few tests by navigating the Selenium client to the signup page, entering in a us

Answer 1

In Django 1.8 it is possible to create a pre-authenticated session cookie and pass it to Selenium.

In order to do this, you'll have to:

1. Create a new session in your backend;
2. Generate a cookie with that newly created session data;
3. Pass that cookie to your Selenium webdriver.

The session and cookie creation logic goes like this:

# create_session_cookie.py
from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth import (
    SESSION_KEY, BACKEND_SESSION_KEY, HASH_SESSION_KEY,
    get_user_model
)
from django.contrib.sessions.backends.db import SessionStore

def create_session_cookie(username, password):

    # First, create a new test user
    user = get_user_model()
    user.objects.create_user(username=username, password=password)

    # Then create the authenticated session using the new user credentials
    session = SessionStore()
    session[SESSION_KEY] = user.pk
    session[BACKEND_SESSION_KEY] = settings.AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS[0]
    session[HASH_SESSION_KEY] = user.get_session_auth_hash()
    session.save()

    # Finally, create the cookie dictionary
    cookie = {
        'name': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME,
        'value': session.session_key,
        'secure': False,
        'path': '/',
    }
    return cookie

Now, inside your Selenium tests:

#selenium_tests.py

# assuming self.webdriver is the selenium.webdriver obj.
from create_session_cookie import create_session_cookie

session_cookie = create_session_cookie(
    username='test@email.com', password='top_secret'
)

# visit some url in your domain to setup Selenium.
# (404 pages load the quickest)
self.driver.get('your-url' + '/404-non-existent/')

# add the newly created session cookie to selenium webdriver.
self.driver.add_cookie(session_cookie)

# refresh to exchange cookies with the server.
self.driver.refresh()

# This time user should present as logged in.
self.driver.get('your-url')