Testing Consumers

When you want to write unit tests for your new Channels consumers, you’ll realize that you can’t use the standard Django test client to submit fake HTTP requests - instead, you’ll need to submit fake Messages to your consumers, and inspect what Messages they send themselves.

We provide a TestCase subclass that sets all of this up for you, however, so you can easily write tests and check what your consumers are sending.

ChannelTestCase

If your tests inherit from the channels.tests.ChannelTestCase base class, whenever you run tests your channel layer will be swapped out for a captive in-memory layer, meaning you don’t need an external server running to run tests.

Moreover, you can inject messages onto this layer and inspect ones sent to it to help test your consumers.

To inject a message onto the layer, simply call Channel.send() inside any test method on a ChannelTestCase subclass, like so:

from channels import Channel
from channels.tests import ChannelTestCase

class MyTests(ChannelTestCase):
    def test_a_thing(self):
        # This goes onto an in-memory channel, not the real backend.
        Channel("some-channel-name").send({"foo": "bar"})

To receive a message from the layer, you can use self.get_next_message(channel), which handles receiving the message and converting it into a Message object for you (if you want, you can call receive_many on the underlying channel layer, but you’ll get back a raw dict and channel name, which is not what consumers want).

You can use this both to get Messages to send to consumers as their primary argument, as well as to get Messages from channels that consumers are supposed to send on to verify that they did.

You can even pass require=True to get_next_message to make the test fail if there is no message on the channel (by default, it will return you None instead).

Here’s an extended example testing a consumer that’s supposed to take a value and post the square of it to the "result" channel:

from channels import Channel
from channels.tests import ChannelTestCase

class MyTests(ChannelTestCase):
    def test_a_thing(self):
        # Inject a message onto the channel to use in a consumer
        Channel("input").send({"value": 33})
        # Run the consumer with the new Message object
        my_consumer(self.get_next_message("input", require=True))
        # Verify there's a result and that it's accurate
        result = self.get_next_message("result", require=True)
        self.assertEqual(result['value'], 1089)

Generic Consumers

You can use ChannelTestCase to test generic consumers as well. Just pass the message object from get_next_message to the constructor of the class. To test replies to a specific channel, use the reply_channel property on the Message object. For example:

from channels import Channel
from channels.tests import ChannelTestCase

from myapp.consumers import MyConsumer

class MyTests(ChannelTestCase):

    def test_a_thing(self):
        # Inject a message onto the channel to use in a consumer
        Channel("input").send({"value": 33})
        # Run the consumer with the new Message object
        message = self.get_next_message("input", require=True)
        MyConsumer(message)
        # Verify there's a reply and that it's accurate
        result = self.get_next_message(message.reply_channel.name, require=True)
        self.assertEqual(result['value'], 1089)

Groups

You can test Groups in the same way as Channels inside a ChannelTestCase; the entire channel layer is flushed each time a test is run, so it’s safe to do group adds and sends during a test. For example:

from channels import Group
from channels.tests import ChannelTestCase

class MyTests(ChannelTestCase):
    def test_a_thing(self):
        # Add a test channel to a test group
        Group("test-group").add("test-channel")
        # Send to the group
        Group("test-group").send({"value": 42})
        # Verify the message got into the destination channel
        result = self.get_next_message("test-channel", require=True)
        self.assertEqual(result['value'], 42)

Multiple Channel Layers

If you want to test code that uses multiple channel layers, specify the alias of the layers you want to mock as the test_channel_aliases attribute on the ChannelTestCase subclass; by default, only the default layer is mocked.

You can pass an alias argument to get_next_message and Channel to use a different layer too.