Question

I just learnt that with Rails is possible to simulate HTTP requests in the console with few lines of code.

Check out: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3176-three-quick-rails-console-tips (section “Dive into your app”).

Is there a similar way to do that with Django? Would be handy.

Answer 1

How I simulate requests from the python command line is:

• Use the excellent requests library
• Use the django reverse function

A simple way of simulating requests is:

>>> from django.urls import reverse
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get(reverse('app.views.your_view'))
>>> r.text
(prints output)
>>> r.status_code
200

Update: be sure to launch the django shell (via manage.py shell), not a classic python shell.

Update 2: For Django <1.10, change the first line to

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse