Source: 📖 Test Driven Development with Python ch9 p158

Setting up a staging server for tests

In order to begin the deployment process, it's best to have a staging server where we can see how our site will behave before pushing to the live server. This gives us a layer in between the final deployment server and our local computer, as the staging server is a remote server which gives us the ability to do a kind of 'soft' deployment.

To set up a staging server for testing purposes, first save the URL where the server will be in an environment variable called STAGING_SERVER. Once this is done we can replace the StaticLiveServerTestCase's (or LiveServerTestCase) .live_server_url attribute to our STAGING_SERVER variable inside the setUp() method.

import os
from django.tests import StaticLiveServerTestCase
from selenium import webdriver


class MyTest(StaticLiveServerTest):
	
	def setUp(self):
		self.browser = webdriver.Firefox()
		staging_server = os.environ.get('STAGING_SERVER')
		if staging_server:
			self.live_server_url = f'http://{staging_server}'

This is a hacky approach that will override the default server URL that LiveServerTestCase uses. The if clause allows us to still run tests normally if a STAGING_SERVER variable has not been defined.

You can run these tests using the staging server by defining the variable before the test command in the shell:

$ STAGING_SERVER=my-staging-url.co.uk python manage.py test