Getting Started

If you’re new to Behave you should start with the Behave Tutorial and its follow-up chapters on the theory and practice of behavior-driven development (BDD).

Setting up Behave for a Django project is no different than using Behave for any other Python project, except that:

1. you add behave-django to the INSTALLED_APPS in the settings of your Django project, and

2. you run Behave via the behave management command.

Create a folder structure

The Feature Testing Setup chapter of Behave’s documentation describes the various files and directories to prepare for your BDD test setup.

The Behave documentation suggest to start by adding a features folder to your project root directory, which contains your feature files, the test environment control module, and a steps subdirectory for the code that implements the given, when, then steps of your features in Python.

features/
    steps/
        your_steps.py
    environment.py
    your-feature.feature

Alternatively, you can put both the features and the steps folder in a tests folder of your project root directory. This is recommended if you want to follow common practices of Python projects.

tests/
    features/
        example.feature
    steps/
        given.py
        then.py
        when.py
    environment.py

Your Behave configuration in pyproject.toml should then look somewhat like this:

[tool.behave]
junit = true
junit_directory = "tests"
paths = ["tests"]

Execute your tests

Run python manage.py behave to execute your feature tests:

$ python manage.py behave
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
Feature: Running tests # features/running-tests.feature:1
  In order to prove that behave-django works
  As the Maintainer
  I want to test running behave against this features directory
  Scenario: The Test                       # features/running-tests.feature:6
    Given this step exists                 # features/steps/running_tests.py:4 0.000s
    When I run "python manage.py behave"   # features/steps/running_tests.py:9 0.000s
    Then I should see the behave tests run # features/steps/running_tests.py:14 0.000s

1 features passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped
1 scenarios passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped
3 steps passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped, 0 undefined
Took.010s
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...

See the environment.py, running-tests.feature and steps/running_tests.py files in the tests/acceptance folder of the behave-django project repository for implementation details of the above example. See that folder also for more useful examples.

Note

The behave docs provide additional helpful information on using Behave with Django and various test automation libraries.