[Django]-What's the proper way to test token-based auth using APIRequestFactory?

I wanted to test the authentication function itself, so forcing authentication wans’t an option.

One way to properly pass the token is to use APIClient, which you already have imported.

client = APIClient()
client.credentials(HTTP_AUTHORIZATION='Token ' + self.token.key)
response = client.get('/api/vehicles/')

That sets your given token into the request header and lets the back end decide if it’s valid or not.

Sorry for digging this old thread up, but if someone is using APIClient() to do their tests you can do the following:

from rest_framework.test import APITestCase
from rest_framework.test import APIClient
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token
from django.contrib.auth.models import User


class VehicleCreationTests(APITestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.client = APIClient()
        self.user = User.objects.create_superuser('admin', 'admin@admin.com', 'admin123')
        self.token = Token.objects.create(user=self.user)

    def testcase(self):
        self.client.force_login(user=self.user)
        response = self.client.post('/api/vehicles/', data=vehicle_data, format='json', HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=self.token)
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 201)

Really good resource that I’ve used to come up with this is django-rest-framework-jwt tests

The simpler way to force_authentication using a built-in method from APITestCase is:

class Test(APITestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        user1 = User.objects.create_user(username='foo')
        self.client.force_authenticate(user=user1) # self.client is from APITestCase

    ... the rest of your tests ...