no documentation about authentication in test

[deronnax]

I have been trying to create a chat app in an existing Django project, and I am surprised by the amount of channels domains not covered by the documentation. I will probably create an issue/discussion for all of them.
The one I have in front of me now is: the documentation talks about authentication, but there is no indication whatsoever on how do it in test.
Are we supposed to feed hand-made headers to the websocket communicator? If that is so, even just a line saying it is the way to go would be huge improvment over head-scratching.
I am willing to add this line, and even go some extra steps if greenlighted.
Cheers.

[huynguyengl99]

Hi @deronnax!

You're right - WebSocket authentication testing requires manual header construction. For your immediate needs:

# Session auth testing pattern
user = User.objects.create_user(username='test', password='test')
self.client.login(username='test', password='test')
cookies = self.client.cookies
headers = [(b"cookie", f"sessionid={cookies['sessionid'].value}".encode())]
communicator = WebsocketCommunicator(Consumer.as_asgi(), "/ws/", headers=headers)

Better Solution: Chanx

I built Chanx specifically to solve this problem. It provides:

Simplified Testing:

from chanx.testing import WebsocketTestCase

class ChatTest(WebsocketTestCase):
    async def test_auth(self):
        await self.auth_communicator.connect()
        await self.auth_communicator.assert_authenticated_status_ok()

DRF-Style Authentication:

from chanx.generic.websocket import AsyncJsonWebsocketConsumer

class ChatConsumer(AsyncJsonWebsocketConsumer[ChatMessage]):
    authentication_classes = [SessionAuthentication]
    permission_classes = [IsAuthenticated]

Multi-User Testing:

# Test multiple authenticated users easily
second_comm = self.create_communicator(headers=different_user_headers)

Links:

• Install: pip install chanx
• Docs: https://chanx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-guide/testing.html
• Example: https://github.com/huynguyengl99/chanx-example

This addresses exactly the documentation gaps you mentioned! 🚀