Factory Boy - An alternative for Fixtures

Factory Boy is a fixtures replacement tool. It allows you to use objects customized for the current test, while only declaring the test-specific fields.

Setting up your factories:

For testing the Django app, create a root directory named tests. Then create __init__.py, tests.py (to write your tests), factories.py (to write your model factories) in that directory.

So, your app layout looks like:

  myapp
    |- __init__.py
    |- admin.py
    |- forms.py
    |- models.py
    |- tests
        |- __init__.py
        |- factories.py
        |- tests.py
    |- urls.py
    |- views.py

Features of Factory Boy:

It allows you to automate much of the testing scenarios. Some examples are:

  1. Use a 'Sequence' object using a lambda function to dynamically create unique field values:
        EX: username = factory.Sequence(lambda n: 'user_%d' % n)

  2. Use a LazyAttribute object to pick from a range of choices for a defined field
        EX: choice = factory.LazyAttribute(lambda s: random.choice(dict(MyModel.CHOICES).keys()))

A basic factory: Factories declare a set of attributes used to instantiate an object. Here's a basic factory that generates auth.User instances:

# factories.py
from factory import DjangoModelFactory, lazy_attribute
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class UserFactory(DjangoModelFactory):
    first_name = 'Shirisha'
    last_name = 'Gaddi'
    username = factory.Sequence(lambda n: 'user_%d' % n)
    email = lazy_attribute(lambda obj: obj.username + "@example.com")

    class Meta:
        model = 'User'
        django_get_or_create = ('username',)

Calling this as factories.UserFactory() will perform same task as User.objects.create call. Howerver, it is possible to override the defined attributes by passing keyword arguments:

# Create a user instance by overriding first_name
user = factories.UserFactory(first_name="Karuna")

The factory's Meta has django_get_or_create set, which means the factory will call the Django built-in User.objects.get_or_create method.