How to set session variables in Django unit tests.

This was super non-obvious, and I lifted code from a couple of different places.

If you’ve got Django view code that gets & sets session values, you’ll want to test it properly, and the standard “self.client” from Django’s TestCase doesn’t really give you a usable session.  So, here’s the method I’m using:

def stuff_session(client, dictionary):
    """Given a client (self.client in a unit test TestCase) set the session to the contents of
    the dictionary given"""
    from django.conf import settings
    from django.utils.importlib import import_module
    engine = import_module(settings.SESSION_ENGINE)
    store = engine.SessionStore()
    store.save()  # we need to make load() work, or the cookie isworthless
    client.cookies[settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME] = store.session_key
    session = client.session
    session.update(dictionary)
    session.save()
    # and now remember to re-login!

So, in my setUp() methods, I just call stuff_session(self.client, {‘key’: ‘value’}) and it all works out great.