Unit-testing a Python CGI script

This summer I'm overhauling Tamarin, my automated grading system. Under the hood, Tamarin is little more than a bunch of Python CGI scripts. However, as I overhaul it and convert it from Python 2 to 3, I also wanted to build a proper unit test framework for it.

It's been a dozen years or so since I last used Perl and CGI.pm, but I recall running my scripts on the command line and manually specifying key=value pairs. So, I was somewhat surprised to find no comparable way to test my CGI scripts in Python. The official Python cgi module documentation suggests the only way to test a CGI script is in a web server envirnoment. That's an unnecessarily complex environment for quick tests during development and precludes any simple separate unit tests.

In general, I'm not very impressed with the cgi module docs. In fact, browsing around revealed that there are a number of parameter options undocumented in the official docs.

Using this found information, I was able to build my own cgifactory module. Depending on the function called, it allows you to build a cgi object based on either a GET or POST query. For example:

  form = cgifactory.get(key1='value1', key2='v2')

If you then write your CGI script's main function to take an optional CGI object, you can easily build a CGI query, pass it to your script, and then run string matching on the (redirected) output produced by your script. Of course, most of your unit tests will probably be of component functions used by your script, but sometimes you want to test or run your script as a whole unit. cgifactory will help you there.

The cgifactory code is available here, where you'll always find the most recent version. The code itself is actually quite short; most of the file is documentation and doctests showing how to use it. I don't guarantee it's right, but it's worked for me so far. Hopefully it might be of use to someone else too! Feel free to copy, modify, and/or redistribute.

(Oh, and if you really need a command line version, it shouldn't be too hard to write a main that parse key=values pairs into a dictionary and then calls cgifactory.get(pairs) to build the CGI object.)