As I develop the backend side, I also develop the frontend. As you have probably guessed, I have to do some REST requests on my server.

Well, there are a couple of solutions for that. I can use mocks on the frontend, or a fake JSON server. However, there are some cons to this approach:

• I have to remodel what I have on an already existing backend server.
• Dealing with authentication on a fake JSON server is not really comfortable.
• I have to write a lot of boilerplate if I want to go on mocking and unit testing approach.

Again, all the logic I want already exists in my Django project, so what I want is:

1. Run a dev server.
2. Set up a fresh new database.
3. Provide some initial data. Some fake users, posts, whatever.
4. Do my testing on my frontend project while the server runs.
5. Hit the kill signal. (CTRL C)
6. Gracefully drop the database that I have created on step 2.
7. Shutdown the program.

I use pytest and pytest-django. They do exactly these when they set up a test environment, I was wondering if I can manually do that.

Thanks in advance.

Environment

• Python 3.9
• Django 2.2

CodePudding user response：

I never used such integration-testing setup, but I’ve seen it somewhere.

You can run the django-admin testserver mydata.json command to spin up a testing server with data from a provided fixture. The way it was done in the example I saw was by making a custom Django command where instead of static fixture the testserver’s database was populated dynamically by factories. I don’t remember the details how it was implemented, though.

After the testserver was ready, the Cypress tests were run. Backend and the frontend were wired by npm’s start-server-and-test package.

Application with similar setup can be checked out here. Especially note the custom testserver command as well as the cypress commands.