How to login user during Given step using django-behave

Question

I'm using django-behave to run behavioural tests in a Django project. In my feature file I have this given step in several scenarios:

 Given I am logged in

What I've been doing so far is use Selenium to go through the login process manually. But that takes a long time and it's not what I'm testing at this point. Plus the behave documentation says:

Requests/Twill/Selenium interaction etc should mostly go into When steps

So how should I log in a user during this Given step? Is there a way to use django.test.Client.login()? Can I just put a session into a fixture?

Answer 1

Ok, using this answer to a different question, I've gone for this:

@given('I am logged in')
def impl(context):
    client = context.test.client
    client.login(email='test@email.com', password='password')

    cookie = client.cookies['sessionid']

    # Selenium will set cookie domain based on current page domain.
    context.browser.get(context.get_url('/404-loads-fastest/'))
    context.browser.add_cookie({
        'name': 'sessionid',
        'value': cookie.value,
        'secure': False,
        'path': '/',
    })

But it still seems kind of indirect.