Question

I am trying to automate 404 pages testing using Django 1.4’s testing framework.

If I print 127.0.0.1:8000/something/really/weird/ in browser address bar with development server running, I see a 404 page, with correct “404 NOT FOUND” status (as firebug shows).

But if I try to use this code for testing:

from django.test import TestCase
class Sample404TestCase(TestCase):
    def test_wrong_uri_returns_404(self):
        response = self.client.get('something/really/weird/')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 404)

the test fails with this output:

$./manage.py test main
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
.F
======================================================================
FAIL: test_wrong_uri_returns_404 (main.tests.Sample404TestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".../main/tests.py", line 12, in test_wrong_uri_returns_404
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 404)
*AssertionError: 200 != 404*

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.031s

FAILED (failures=1)
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...

I’m seriously surprised with getting 200 code here. Anyone have any idea why on earth this is happening?

updated:

here lies urls.py: http://pastebin.com/DikAVa8T
and actual failing test is:

def test_wrong_uri_returns_404(self):
    response = self.client.get('/something/really/weird/')
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 404)

everything is happening in project https://github.com/gbezyuk/django-app-skeleton

Answer 1

The problem is that your ViewFor404 class returns a 200 status code. Look at Django’s TemplateView definition:

class TemplateView(TemplateResponseMixin, View):
    """
    A view that renders a template.
    """
    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        return {
            'params': kwargs
        }

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        context = self.get_context_data(**kwargs)
        return self.render_to_response(context)

so all your class does is a render_to_response, which generates a ‘200’ response.

If you need to override the 404 handler, you should do something more like this in the view:

return HttpResponseNotFound('<h1>Page not found</h1>')

(I don’t know the equivalent in class-based views)

Or better yet, can you avoid customizing the View? To customize the 404 display, you can just create a 404.html template (in your site’s templates/ directory), and it will be picked up by Django’s error viewer.