Web Browser Automation

You can access the test HTTP server from your preferred web automation library via context.base_url. Alternatively, you can use context.get_url(), which is a helper function for absolute paths and reversing URLs in your Django project. It takes an absolute path, a view name, or a model as an argument, similar to django.shortcuts.redirect.

Examples:

# Using Splinter
@when('I visit "{page}"')
def visit(context, page):
    context.browser.visit(context.get_url(page))

# Get context.base_url
context.get_url()
# Get context.base_url + '/absolute/url/here'
context.get_url('/absolute/url/here')
# Get context.base_url + reverse('view-name')
context.get_url('view-name')
# Get context.base_url + reverse('view-name', 'with args', and='kwargs')
context.get_url('view-name', 'with args', and='kwargs')
# Get context.base_url + model_instance.get_absolute_url()
context.get_url(model_instance)

Remote browsers and Selenium Hub

By default the live test server binds to localhost, which is fine when the browser runs on the same machine as the tests. If your browser runs in a separate container or on a different host (for example, behind a Selenium Grid hub), the server needs to listen on an address the browser can reach.

Django exposes host and port as class attributes on LiveServerTestCase, and uses the same host both to bind the socket and to build live_server_url (which is what context.get_url() returns). Pick a hostname the remote browser can resolve — for example, the docker-compose service name of the Django container — rather than 0.0.0.0, which would leak into the URL handed to the browser. Then pair the subclass with a custom test runner and select it via the --runner option:

# myproject/runner.py
from behave_django.runner import BehaviorDrivenTestRunner
from behave_django.testcase import BehaviorDrivenTestCase


class RemoteBrowserTestCase(BehaviorDrivenTestCase):
    # Must be resolvable from the browser container.
    # In docker-compose this is typically the service name.
    host = 'myapp'
    port = 8100


class RemoteBrowserTestRunner(BehaviorDrivenTestRunner):
    testcase_class = RemoteBrowserTestCase

$ python manage.py behave --runner myproject.runner.RemoteBrowserTestRunner

In your step setup you can then connect to a remote WebDriver and visit context.get_url() as usual — the URL will resolve to the address your browser container can reach:

# features/environment.py
from splinter.browser import Browser

def before_all(context):
    context.browser = Browser(
        driver_name='remote',
        browser='chrome',
        command_executor='http://selenium-hub:4444/wd/hub',
    )

Make sure the chosen host is listed in ALLOWED_HOSTS (or set ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*'] in a test-only settings module), so Django accepts the incoming requests.