Should I add support for other httpx.Client arguments to TestClient?

[danielballan]

Thanks to everyone who worked on moving TestClient to httpx in #1376.

I notice it is missing some arguments including timeout and event_hooks and some others that may be useful to pass through to httpx.Client.__init__. I think it would be fairly straightforward to add these, and I would be happy to contribute a PR.

I can see two points that may need discussion:

• Exactly which parameters should be exposed? For example, should verify be omitted from the function signature, or should setting it anything but a default value raise?
• How should we handle default values? httpx uses sentinel objects that are not public API, so we could (1) define our own sentinel objects, (2) ask that httpx expose their default values as public API, (3) dig the sentinels objects out via signature inspection (seems overly clever to me but technically "public"), or (4) import the internal objects from httpx (seems bad but could be done).

If you would like I could contribute a PR with my best judgment and we could start the discussion from there, or we could first discuss here. Please let me know what would be most helpful. This would be my first contribution to the encode projects; my natural habitat is on the SciPy side.

[Kludex]

@tomchristie Do you have an opinion here?

[lovelydinosaur]

Do you have an opinion here?

I've only got time for a quick comment just now, but to start with...

• timeout - Nope. timeouts on test clients just lets users write flaky tests.
• None of the SSL based parameters make sense in this context.

What else is omitted at the moment?

[danielballan]

I take your point on timeout, and yes I agree that all the SSL parameters make no sense in this context.

Omitted:

• auth
• params
• headers
• http1
• http2
• follow_redirects
• max_redirects
• event_hooks

Currently, these omissions can be worked around by setting properties on the TestClient object after construction, i.e.

tc = TestClient()
tc.auth = ...

But it seems useful to accept them by __init__ as well and pass them through to httpx.Client.

[Kludex]

Let's take each parameter as a separate subject, it will be easier to define "how it can be done now", and see how much are we saving to our users if we merge that on Starlette's TestClient itself.

[danielballan]

Thanks, sounds good.

Should I begin by starting a discussion for a given a parameter?

[Kludex]

That would be a good first step. 🙏