Warning
This documentation is currently a work in progress as the project is still pretty young. As more final versions of this documentation are released I will update this section to reflect that stability.
Auto-generated documentation is located here: API Documentation
Note
These are not completed yet! I will keep updating this page as best I can.
Writing web apps for Google App Engine is becoming really really easy. The App Engine team is releasing new things to make developing and deploying applications as easy as clicking “Deploy” on the SDK Console. However building test suites for your applications is a little bit tricky when you get into testing that you’re using the API correctly. This is where GAE Testbed comes in.
GAE Testbed is a set of base test cases that you can mix into your regular test cases in order to make testing the various pieces of App Engine’s API more intuitive. For example, instead of looking at the API’s mail_stub internal variable has logged a message about an e-mail being sent, you can use assertEmailSent() to make sure that in a live environment an e-mail would be sent from your application.
Note
Clearly there are limitations on what can be asserted. For example, you currently can’t send e-mails with just any from address (it must be one of the admin’s e-mails). GAE Testbed doesn’t know who your admins are so you can’t check for that sort of thing.
GAE Testbed also ensures that each test inside a test case is sandboxed from your other tests. That is, it makes sure the Data Store is completely empty, and likewise for Memcache, the Task Queue, and other APIs.
Stable releases of GAE Testbed are best installed via easy_install or pip. This is as simple as:
sudo easy_install gaetestbed
Since GAE Testbed was built to be used alongside Nose, both Nose and the App Engine plugin for Nose (NoseGAE) are recommended. Both of these can be installed with easy_install as well:
sudo easy_install nose
sudo easy_install nosegae
Finally, certain pieces of GAE Testbed (mainly the WebTestCase) rely on Ian Bicking’s WebTest package, and certain things in WebTest rely on BeautifulSoup to process HTML. All of these can be installed with easy_install:
sudo easy_install webtest
sudo easy_install BeautifulSoup
Thanks to the work by Jason Pellerin and Kumar McMillan, running tests is incredibly simple. To pull in GAE Testbed, all you have to do is import some of the base test cases, and mix them into your own test cases.
For example, to pull in tests that use the Data Store:
import unittest
from gaetestbed import DataStoreTestCase
class MyTestCase(DataStoreTestCase, unittest.TestCase):
def test_datastore(self):
# Write some test code here
pass
I’m working on documenting GAE Testbed as fast as I can, and these docs are definitely improving, but clearly not complete. As I continue working on them, you can take a look at the other mixin test cases in the API Documentation, which should have all the reference information you’d need about custom assert statements and whatnot.
Also, take a look at the Tutorials which should help you get started in writing your first tests for you App Engine application. Finally, when in doubt, there’s always the Index.
GAE Testbed is hosted on Google Code at http://gae-testbed.googlecode.com/. You’re more than welcome to check out the source code (stored in a SVN repo) and provide patches for new features you want, or fixes for bugs that you find. I’ll do my best to respond in a timely manner to feature requests and bug reports.
If you don’t have time to write a patch but would really like a feature added, the best place to make that request would be on the issue tracking page which is located at http://code.google.com/p/gae-testbed/issues/.