Django unit testing with date/time-based objects

Question

EDIT: Since my answer is the accepted answer here I’m updating it to let everyone know a better way has been created in the meantime, the freezegun library: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/freezegun. I use this in all my projects when I want to influence time in tests. Have a look at it.

Original answer:

Replacing internal stuff like this is always dangerous because it can have nasty side effects. So what you indeed want, is to have the monkey patching be as local as possible.

We use Michael Foord’s excellent mock library: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/ that has a @patch decorator which patches certain functionality, but the monkey patch only lives in the scope of the testing function, and everything is automatically restored after the function runs out of its scope.

The only problem is that the internal datetime module is implemented in C, so by default you won’t be able to monkey patch it. We fixed this by making our own simple implementation which can be mocked.

The total solution is something like this (the example is a validator function used within a Django project to validate that a date is in the future). Mind you I took this from a project but took out the non-important stuff, so things may not actually work when copy-pasting this, but you get the idea, I hope 🙂

First we define our own very simple implementation of datetime.date.today in a file called utils/date.py:

import datetime

def today():
    return datetime.date.today()

Then we create the unittest for this validator in tests.py:

import datetime
import mock
from unittest2 import TestCase

from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError

from .. import validators

class ValidationTests(TestCase):
    @mock.patch('utils.date.today')
    def test_validate_future_date(self, today_mock):
        # Pin python's today to returning the same date
        # always so we can actually keep on unit testing in the future :)
        today_mock.return_value = datetime.date(2010, 1, 1)

        # A future date should work
        validators.validate_future_date(datetime.date(2010, 1, 2))

        # The mocked today's date should fail
        with self.assertRaises(ValidationError) as e:
            validators.validate_future_date(datetime.date(2010, 1, 1))
        self.assertEquals([u'Date should be in the future.'], e.exception.messages)

        # Date in the past should also fail
        with self.assertRaises(ValidationError) as e:
            validators.validate_future_date(datetime.date(2009, 12, 31))
        self.assertEquals([u'Date should be in the future.'], e.exception.messages)

The final implementation looks like this:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError

from utils import date

def validate_future_date(value):
    if value <= date.today():
        raise ValidationError(_('Date should be in the future.'))

Hope this helps

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