Django : testing static files

Using the testing framework (TestCase) of Django 1.3, I would like to run some tests on static files (i.e., files not necessarily served by django itself on prod but that can be served for debug (runserver)). But if I run

self.client.get("/static/somefile.json")

... I get a 404 error in my tests. 开发者_JS百科(of course, this file is available on runserver)

Why not, but what would be the nicest way to check the presence of this json schema in my static files ? (in my case, I would also like to test this public json schema against a generated json output, so I want the content of the file)

Another method which I find slightly easier as there's less to type/import:

from django.contrib.staticfiles import finders

result = finders.find('css/base.css')

If the static file was found, it will return the full path to the file. If not found, it will return None

Source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#finders-module

As of Django 1.7+, you can also find out/test where Django is looking through the finders module:

searched_locations = finders.searched_locations

In addition to the SimpleTestCase.assertTemplateUsed(response, template_name, msg_prefix='') assertion provided by Django, you could also make use of: response.templates from the Response class to get a list of templates that were used to render the response.

Source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/tools/#django.test.Response.templates

how about this:

from django.contrib.staticfiles import finders
from django.contrib.staticfiles.storage import staticfiles_storage

absolute_path = finders.find('somefile.json')
assert staticfiles_storage.exists(absolute_path)

This uses the staticfiles finders to find a file called 'somefile.json' and then checks if the file actually exists on the storage you configured?

You could use class testing.StaticLiveServerTestCase from the staticfiles module: http://django.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ref/contrib/staticfiles.html#specialized-test-case-to-support-live-testing

As isbadawi comments, the test server always runs with DEBUG = False. So you can't rely on the DEBUG handling of static files, you need an explicit production-like way of handling them for the test to find them. You could have a special section in your urls.py that turns on the development serve() for when you run test:

if 'test' in sys.argv:
    static_url = re.escape(settings.STATIC_URL.lstrip('/'))
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        url(r'^%s(?P<path>.*)$' % static_url, 'django.views.static.serve', {
            'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT,
        }),
    )

This is for serving static files ONLY during development: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#static-file-development-view

FWIW, for significant projects, I would offer the opinion that testing static files might be outside the scope of pure Django testing since Django's runserver is not intended to be used for serving static files. This kind of testing would usually be reserved for integration tests that involves testing your deployment more so than the development code.