test.Client.login()

login(**credentials) [source]

If your site uses Django’s authentication system and you deal with logging in users, you can use the test client’s login() method to simulate the effect of a user logging into the site.

After you call this method, the test client will have all the cookies and session data required to pass any login-based tests that may form part of a view.

The format of the credentials argument depends on which authentication backend you’re using (which is configured by your AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting). If you’re using the standard authentication backend provided by Django (ModelBackend), credentials should be the user’s username and password, provided as keyword arguments:

>>> c = Client()
>>> c.login(username='fred', password='secret')

# Now you can access a view that's only available to logged-in users.

If you’re using a different authentication backend, this method may require different credentials. It requires whichever credentials are required by your backend’s authenticate() method.

login() returns True if it the credentials were accepted and login was successful.

Finally, you’ll need to remember to create user accounts before you can use this method. As we explained above, the test runner is executed using a test database, which contains no users by default. As a result, user accounts that are valid on your production site will not work under test conditions. You’ll need to create users as part of the test suite – either manually (using the Django model API) or with a test fixture. Remember that if you want your test user to have a password, you can’t set the user’s password by setting the password attribute directly – you must use the set_password() function to store a correctly hashed password. Alternatively, you can use the create_user() helper method to create a new user with a correctly hashed password.