Test-Driven Development with Python

Chapter 15. User Authentication, Integrating Third-Party Plugins, and Mocking with JavaScript

Our beautiful lists site has been live for a few days, and our users are starting to come back to us with feedback. “We love the site”, they say, “but we keep losing our lists. Manually remembering URLs is hard. It’d be great if it could remember what lists we’d started”.

Remember Henry Ford and faster horses. Whenever you hear a user requirement, it’s important to dig a little deeper and think—what is the real requirement here? And how can I make it involve a cool new technology I’ve been wanting to try out?

Clearly the requirement here is that people want to have some kind of user account on the site. So, without further ado, let’s dive into authentication.

Naturally we’re not going to mess about with remembering passwords ourselves—besides being so ’90s, secure storage of user passwords is a security nightmare we’d rather leave to someone else. We’ll use a federated authentication system instead.

(If you insist on storing your own passwords, Django’s default auth module is ready and waiting for you. It’s nice and straightforward, and I’ll leave it to you to discover on your own.)

In this chapter, we’re going to get pretty deep into a testing technique called “mocking”. Personally, I know it took me a few weeks to really get my head around mocking, so don’t worry if it’s confusing at first. In this chapter we do a lot of mocking in JavaScript. In the next chapter we’ll do some mocking ...