Logging in as an inactive user in a Django test

Question

I have a Participant model that contains a django.contrib.auth.model.User with it's is_active property to False. That prevents these users from logging themselves in. An admin user has to do that for them, using some custom code I've written that uses django.contrib.auth.authenticate().

I need to be able to authenticate these users in my tests,

class ParticipantFactory(factory.django.DjangoModelFactory):
    class Meta:
        model = Participant

    user = factory.SubFactory(InactiveUserFactory)
    first_location = factory.SubFactory(LocationFactory)
    location = factory.SubFactory(LocationFactory)
    study_id = FuzzyText(prefix='7')


class BasicTest(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):            
        self.u = User.objects.create_user(
            'test_user', '[email protected]', 'test_pass')
        self.u.is_active = False
        self.u.save()
        self.participant = ParticipantFactory(user=self.u)

        # This works but has no effect on the tests
        auth = authenticate(username=self.u.username, password='test_pass')
        assert(auth is not None)

        # This fails because the user is inactive
        # login = self.client.login(username=self.u.username,
        #                          password='test_pass')
        # assert(login is True)

Does anyone have an idea how to authenticate this inactive user?

Answer 1

I was able to solve this by setting the user to active right before doing the login:

class BasicTest(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        u = InactiveUserFactory()
        u.set_password('test_pass')
        u.save()
        self.participant = ParticipantFactory(user=u)
        self.u = self.participant.user

        self.u.is_active = True
        self.u.save()
        login = self.client.login(username=self.u.username,
                                  password='test_pass')
        assert(login is True)

        self.u.is_active = False
        self.u.save()