How can I test a Flask application which uses SQLAlchemy?

flask, python, session, sqlalchemy, testing

Solution

I suggest you use the Flask-Testing extension. This is an approved extension which lets you do the unit testing as you desire. It has a specific section for SQLAlchemy as well.

Testing with SQLAlchemy

This covers a couple of points if you are using Flask-Testing with SQLAlchemy. It is assumed that you are using the Flask-SQLAlchemy extension, but if not the examples should not be too difficult to adapt to your own particular setup.

First, ensure you set the database URI to something other than your production database ! Second, it’s usually a good idea to create and drop your tables with each test run, to ensure clean tests:"

from flask.ext.testing import TestCase

from myapp import create_app, db

class MyTest(TestCase):

    SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = "sqlite://"
    TESTING = True

    def create_app(self):

        # pass in test configuration
        return create_app(self)

    def setUp(self):

        db.create_all()

    def tearDown(self):

        db.session.remove()
        db.drop_all()

Problem

I have a working web application on Flask with SqlAlchemy for moderation of news, it has some api methods to handle moderation requests, such as approve, deny currently selected news, list them, etc. I want to write unit tests to this methods, and I made them work, but I don't understand how to implement executing all requests which I do from test cases in one db session, so that I could remove all changes to database. Or is there another cleaner or proper way to do this? I've found out that maybe all I need is "scoped_session" in SqlAlchemy, but all my attempts to implement it have failed. If that's correct way, please, tell me where to use this lines of code (in settings, or in test case set_up method). ``` from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker session_factory = sessionmaker() Session = scoped_session(session_factory) ```

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