Rest WebService Testing using Python
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sat Jul 12 09:47:06 EDT 2014
In article <bbdb1f48-9fe8-43af-a765-de5894d38b2d at googlegroups.com>,
neeraj.bakhtani at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi folks,
> This is Neeraj , I want to develop some standalone python Scripts to Test
> Rest Webservices i.e. WADL services with endpoints.
>
> Particularly I need "A script for logging in would pass the xml to the rest
> api with variables for all the payload fields python"
>
>
> So Can Anyone please provide me some sample scripts or tutorials or package
> that can help me in above Scenario for automating the Rest WebService Testing
> for me
>
> I am new to python.So please bear with me..:)
>
> Thanks in advance
The question you are asking is broad, so I can only make some general
suggestions. You've really got two needs here. One is you need some
kind of test framework, the other is that you need some way to talk to
an HTTP server. Let's attack those one at a time.
Test framework. Testing is all about writing down a list of things you
believe to be true, and then exercising the code to verify that they are
indeed true. When I do X, I expect Y to happen. If it does, the test
passes. If not, the test fails. Generally you write a large number of
these tests, and run them all.
A lot of this is boilerplate. You need some way to organize all the
individual tests. Run them (or perhaps run subsets of them). Record
which ones passed or not. Set up the right environment for each test to
run, and possibly clean up after each one. The idea of a test framework
is that it takes care of most of this for you automatically, letting you
concentrate on the test logic.
There's a couple of choices for test frameworks. The standard one that
comes packaged with Python is unittest
(https://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html). I used to use it a
lot, but I've come to regard it as somewhat klunky. Still, it's the
standard. If you've used JUnit, it has the advantage that it will feel
very familiar.
A newer alternative is nose (https://nose.readthedocs.org/), which is
what I mostly use now. Nose simplifies some things, but sometimes can
be a bit difficult to understand (the docs can be a bit obtuse in
places). The big advantage of nose is it has some very powerful tools
for running tests in parallel. If you have a lot of tests that are I/O
bound, this can seriously reduce the time to run your test suite.
There's also doctest (https://docs.python.org/2/library/doctest.html),
but for the kind of testing you want to do, it's probably not the right
tool. I include it only for completeness.
OK, so now, how to talk to your HTTP service. That's easy. You want to
use requests (http://docs.python-requests.org). If your web service
involves persisting state on the client side with cookies, you'll want
to explore requests' session functionality.
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