capsul-flask/docs/testing.md

automated testing

Automated tests could make it safer to contribute code, easier to review new code, and much easier to refactor, or upgrade Python dependencies.

To run tests:

1. create a Postgres database called capsulflask_test

• e.g.: docker exec -it d1702306f409 psql -U postgres createdb -O postgres capsulflask_test;
  • (d1702306f409 is the docker container ID of the postgres container)

2. run python -m unittest

Architecture

I tried to make the absolute minimal changes to be able to override settings in tests – possible alternative approaches include accepting an argument to create_app() to define which env file to load, or adding conditional logic to create_app() to pre-load specific settings before running load_dotenv() – but allowing env vars to override dotenv vars seemed cleanest. (Thanks @forest for improving on this approach)

Creating test databases

One outstanding question is how to initialise/reinitialise the test database.

Currently, the tests rely on the existence of a capsulflask_test database on localhost, accessible by the postgres user with password dev.

I create this manually using: docker exec -it d1702306f409 psql -U postgres createdb -O postgres capsulflask_test;

where d1702306f409 is the docker container ID of the postgres container.

In between test runs, you can either drop and recreate that database, or manually clear data using:

docker exec -it d1702306f409 psql -U postgres capsulflask_test -c "DELETE FROM vms; DELETE FROM login_tokens; DELETE FROM ssh_public_keys; DELETE FROM api_tokens; DELETE FROM accounts;

Test coverage

This tests the "landing" (public) pages, login, capsul index and creation. I didn't add automated coverage reporting yet, unclear if that seems useful.