Balder Intro Example¶

In the next sections, we want to test the login functionality for a website. For this, we will create a scenario, that allows us to test the login procedure. This scenario secures that we are logged-in over the possibility that we can access the internal webpage.

Our goal is an implementation, that allows executing the scenario with a lot of different environments (Setup classes). For example we want to execute our test scenarios with an UI setup and also with a REST API setup.

The project we are using in this tutorial is the balderexample-loginserver. You can find it on GitHub. It is a Django Application that has a graphical login interface to login into a internal backend area. In addition to that, the project also implements a REST interface, which allows to get a JSON representation of all registered users and permission groups. This REST application supports a Basic Authentication (with username and password).

Do not worry, you don’t need experiences with Django or with REST, we will go through this topics and don’t have to implement these functionality by ourselves.

So let’s start.

Prepare the loginserver¶

Before we can really start testing the loginserver, we have to initialize our environment.

Checkout/Download loginserver¶

First of all you have to checkout the loginserver. For this make sure, that you have installed git.

After you have installed git, you can checkout the repository with the command:

>>> git clone https://github.com/balder-dev/balderexample-loginserver.git

This command will download the latest environment of the loginserver.

ALTERNATIVE: Manually download the repository

Otherwise you can also download the loginserver package from github and extract it in a directory of your choice. Make sure that you download/checkout the main branch!

OPTIONAL: Start virtual environment¶

With virtual environments it is possible to separate your system installed packages from the project dependencies. With this you install project packages only on project level and your system packages will not be changed. More information about the virtual environment, you can find in the official venv documentation.

You can create a new virtual environment simple by executing the build in command. Go to the root directory of the loginserver project and execute the following command

>>> python38 -m venv venv

This will create the virtual environment.

After you have created the venv, you have to activate it. The command to activate the virtual environment is depended on your OS:

Activate VirtualEnv¶
OS	Shell	Command
POSIX	bash/zsh	$ source venv/bin/activate
POSIX	fish	$ source venv/bin/activate.fish
POSIX	csh/tcsh	$ source venv/bin/activate.csh
POSIX	PowerShell Core	$ source venv/bin/Activate.ps1
POSIX	csh/tcsh	$ source venv/bin/activate.csh
POSIX	PowerShell Core	$ venv/bin/Activate.ps1
WINDOWS	cmd.exe	C:> venvScriptsactivate.bat
WINDOWS	PowerShell	PS C:> venvScriptsActivate.ps1

Note

You have to activate the venv (last command) in every new console session before you can use the virtual environment.

Install requirements¶

All dependencies that are required by the loginserver project are defined in the requirements.txt. You can install all of these dependencies by simply executing the following command:

>>> pip install -r requirements.txt

This command will install all dependencies for the loginserver.

Start development server¶

If you want to run the balderexample-loginserver application, just start the django included developer server. For this, call the following command:

>>> python3 manage.py runserver

Now the server is available at url http://localhost:8000

../_images/balderexample-loginserver-login.png

Use specific port:

You can also set a specific port with an additional argument. To start the server on port 3000 simply execute the command:

>>> python3 manage.py runserver 3000

Warning

Never use this package in an real environment. It uses the Django developer server that is only for developing and not secure to use in a productive environment.

Prepare Balder¶

Now it’s time to prepare our Balder environment. For this, we create a sub folder tests into our project.

Note

For an easier development we integrate our Balder project inside the main project directory. In the most cases, it doesn’t make sense to do it this way, because we want to do the test for multiple environments. For an easier workflow in this example here, however, we create a directory tests directly in the project.

First of all, we have to create a new Balder environment in our project. For this we create a new Balder project in our tests directory. We will create the following directory structure:

- balderexample-loginserver/
    |- ...
    |- tests
        |- lib
            |- __init__.py
            |- connections.py
            |- features.py
        |- scenarios
            |- __init__.py

The lib directory contains important stuff we maybe want to reuse, like Feature or Connection objects. The scenario module will contain our Scenario class later.

One submodule is still missing. We also need Setup classes. We will add them later.