Testing

Use Starlette's TestClient against the combined ASGI application. Django's test database and pytest-django continue to work.

from starlette.testclient import TestClient
from project.asgi import application


def test_health():
    response = TestClient(application).get("/api/health")
    assert response.status_code == 200

Authenticated client

Create a session with Django's client and copy the cookie:

from django.conf import settings
from django.test import Client as DjangoClient
from starlette.testclient import TestClient


def asgi_client_for(user):
    django_client = DjangoClient()
    django_client.force_login(user)

    client = TestClient(application)
    cookie = django_client.cookies[settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME]
    client.cookies.set(settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME, cookie.value)
    return client

What to test

• Anonymous, authenticated, and staff dependencies.
• Valid and invalid CSRF submissions.
• The actual session backend used in production.
• Custom resolver precedence and token failures.
• Pydantic rejection of unknown or malformed input.
• Permission-aware response fields.
• Query counts for response mappers and related objects.
• Both synchronous and asynchronous ORM paths.
• The combined mount prefix and Django fallback.

Do not replace application-level tests with OpenAPI snapshots. OpenAPI proves the declared contract, not authorization or database behavior.