How to set headers in DRF's APIClient() delete() request?

Question

When running tests, I'd like to create and then delete some resources. Access to the target server requires authenticating with a token.

from django.test import TestCase
from rest_framework.test import APIClient

(...)

class MyTest(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.client = APIClient()

    def test_creation_and_deletion(self):
        payload = {"key": "value"}

        # This works, but it's handled by a custom create() method from views.py:
        res = self.client.post(<url>, payload)
        (...)

        # This doesn't work, no custom delete() method is defined anywhere:
        tar_headers = {"private-token": "<token>"}
        res2 = self.client.delete(res.data["target_resource_url"], headers=tar_headers)

        # Either this doesn't work:
        self.client.headers.update(tar_headers)
        res3 = self.client.delete(res.data["target_resource_url"])

Printing res2 gives the following output:

<HttpResponseNotFound status_code=404, "text/html">

Calling res3 gives an error:

AttributeError: 'APIClient' object has no attribute 'headers'

Deletion requests sent towards target_resource_url from e.g. Postman work fine as long as token is given in headers.

How to approach this issue?

Answer 1

Apparently, it's not possible to authenticate with a Private-Token while requesting deletion via APIClient(). But instead, the good old requests library can be used:

import requests

HEADERS = {'PRIVATE-TOKEN': <TOKEN>}

res = ...
if "api_link" in res.data:
    requests.delete(res.data["api_link"], headers=HEADERS)