Testing URLs - URLs that don't exist return 200

Question

I have a function to test my URLs which looks like this:

def test_URLs(self):

    routes = [
    'about/',
    'archive/',
    'index/',
    'admin/',
    ''
    'doesntExist/'
    ]

    for route in routes:
        response = self.client.get(route)
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)  

and my URL patterns which looks like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    #CMS url
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^$', 'core.views.index'),
    url(r'^index/', 'core.views.index'),
    url(r'about/', 'core.views.about'),
    url(r'^archive/', 'core.views.archive'),
    url(r'^talks/(?P<slug>[\w\-]+)/$', 'core.views.getTalk'),

In my test_URLs function, the route 'doesntExist/' doesn't exist, rather aptly. When I run my server and try to access doesntExist/ I get the log message

[04/Oct/2013 09:37:40] "GET /doesntExist/ HTTP/1.1" 404 2629

So doesntExist/ definitely doesn't exist yet when I run the above test I get:

Creating test database for alias 'default'...
..
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.017s

OK

Why does my test think it exists?

Answer 1

My problem was I was using an app called Lockdown. Status codes where being returned as 200 because it was getting the login HTML form which is displayed no matter what the URL is if a user hasn't logged in before.

Simply don't use Lockdown whenever you're testing.