How do you test django-axes with a Django unit test?

Question

I'm using Django Axes with my Django project to ensure that if someone is trying to guess a password, their IP gets blocked for a while.

It's setup, and works great.

I want to write a Django test that makes sure that after X number of guesses, the user is really locked out.

The problem I'm having is that if you try to use the django test client to do a login as you normally would:

self.client.login(username="invalid_user", password="invalid_password")

Axes crashes, because it isn't getting a request arg:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/my_project/website/login_app/tests/test_views.py", line 71, in test_brute_force_attempts
    self.client.login(username="invalid_user", password="invalid_password")
  File "/opt/my_project/venv3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/test/client.py", line 602, in login
    user = authenticate(**credentials)
  File "/opt/my_project/venv3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/contrib/auth/__init__.py", line 73, in authenticate
    user = backend.authenticate(request, **credentials)
  File "/opt/my_project/venv3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/axes/helpers.py", line 411, in inner
    return func(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/opt/my_project/venv3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/axes/backends.py", line 39, in authenticate
    "AxesBackend requires a request as an argument to authenticate"
axes.exceptions.AxesBackendRequestParameterRequired: AxesBackend requires a request as an argument to authenticate

This is a known issue, and is discussed here: https://github.com/jazzband/django-axes/issues/433

As far as I can tell, you just need to pass self.client.login a request= arg, which it will pass to django.contrib.auth.authenticate , and it'll be happy. I can't figure out where to get this request within a test method. I tried this, but it didn't work either:

class TestBruteForceAttempts(TestCase):
    def test_brute_force_attempts(self):
        login_attempts_to_make = django_settings.AXES_FAILURE_LIMIT + 1 

        for i in range(login_attempts_to_make):
            self.client.login(request=self.client.request(), username="invalid_user", password="invalid_password")
            ...

Is there any way to test Django Axes from a Django unit test? I'm clearly doing something wrong.

Answer 1

As stated in the Django Axes documentation , rather than using client.login you can directly call the Django authenticate function passing a mock request.

Something like this should do the trick:

from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
from django.http import HttpRequest

class TestBruteForceAttempts(TestCase):
    def test_brute_force_attempts(self):
        login_attempts_to_make = django_settings.AXES_FAILURE_LIMIT + 1

        for i in range(login_attempts_to_make):
            request = HttpRequest()
            authenticate(request, username="invalid_user", password="invalid_password")

        # Assert IP is blocked

You probably need to specify some information in the request, for example a fixed IP.

Alternatively, here you can see how the test you need is implemented in Django Axes, you could use the same approach.