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Your new Django site need tests. Nothing super fancy, just enough that you know it's not going to start 500ing next time you deploy. You could write unit tests, but those are boring and your client sure as hell isn't going to pay for the time.

You've got five minutes, though.

• Simple
  • Iterates through a list of URLs and complains if any of them 500.
• Magic
  • Will loudly complain when there are views missing from the list of URLs to test.
• Has what you need
  • Comes with an optional test mixin for validating JSON. HTML validators and dead link detectors coming soon.
• Extensible
  • Easily add tests that will run against every view on your website. If you want tests for things like consistent capitalisation of a particular phrase or the universal inclusion of a particular meta tag, you can have them in minutes.

pip install django-instant-coverage

You'll want a tests module somewhere. I keep mine in my PROJECT_DIR, because it's testing the whole site and not just one app. Wherever you put it, it should be named such that your test runner will find it (tests.py usually works well) and should contain at least the following:

from django.test import TestCase

from instant_coverage import InstantCoverageMixin


class EverythingTest(InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase):
    pass

With that in place, you should be able to run your tests with python manage.py test. They'll fail, though. You'll get a list of URLs you've not told it to test, looking something like this:

AssertionError: The following views are untested:

('^',) ^$ (index)
('^admin/',) ^$ (index)
('^admin/',) ^logout/$ (logout)
('^admin/',) ^password_change/$ (password_change)
[...]

It'll probably contain a bunch of URLs you don't want to test, though, like those from the Django admin app. To quickly exclude entire URL includes, add tuples like the ones shown in the failure you just got to your test's uncovered_includes attribute:

class EverythingTest(instantcoveragemixin, testcase):
    uncovered_includes = [
        ('^admin/',),
    ]

Add URLs that you do actually want to test to covered_urls, and add those you don't to uncovered_urls. If you forget what's still missing, run the tests again to get an audit of what's left.

class EverythingTest(instantcoveragemixin, testcase):
    covered_urls = [
        '/',
        '/api/',
        '/0007C3F2760E0541/',
    ]

    uncovered_urls = [
        # requires stuff to be in the session
        '/upload/confirm/',
        '/shortlist-selection/',

        # only accepts POST
        '/shortlist-order/',
    ]

If you have views that you can't test without data present in the database, make a fixtures file and add it to your test class.

If you want to test all the URLs you've listed under different circumstances (for instance, when a user is logged in or when a different language has been selected), create a subclass of your tests and override setUp(). For instance, you might put the following below your EverythingTest:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model


class LoggedInEverythingTest(EverythingTest):
    def setUp(self):
        super(LoggedInEverythingTest, self).setUp()
        user = get_user_model()(
            username='user',
            is_staff=True,
            is_superuser=True,
        )
        user.set_password('pass')
        user.save()
        self.assertTrue(self.client.login(username='user', password='pass'))

Instant Coverage provides a number of optional test mixins that you may find useful. Look in instant_coverage/optional.py for details. To use them, do something like this:

from instant_coverage import InstantCoverageMixin, optional


class EverythingTest(optional.ValidJSON, InstantCoverageMixin, TestCase):
    # covered_urls, etc...