Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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pytest: no-boilerplate testing (part 3)

In my previous blog post I covered writing exception-based assertions and fixtures. Today I'm going to close things out by demonstrating how to change the behavior of pytest and how to integrate it with Django and setup.py.

Changing the Behavior of pytest

When pytest is called, either via the command-line or by pytest.main(), it looks for a configuration file called either pytest.ini, tox.ini, and setup.cfg. If it finds a configuration file, it follows standard practices for those things. In the following example, I demonstrating searching for tests inside of all Python files while ignoring the **_build** directories:

# pytest.ini (or tox.ini or setup.cfg)
[pytest] # You must put pytest-related controls in a 'pytest' block
python_files=*.py  # Run tests against all python modules
norecursedirs = _build # Don't look inside of _build directories

Changing pytest Behavior Dynamically

This is pretty nice, but if I need to ignore certain Python modules like setup.py? I can do this by creating a conftest.py module and defining a collect_ignore variable.

# conftest.py
collect_ignore = ["setup.py", "conftest.py"]

The conftest.py module can actually be defined per directory. So if test behavior needs to change in different packages, just create additional conftest.py modules. It's simple to do, but really powerful.

The conftest module is capable of a lot of other things. Right now there doesn't seem to be a page that documents it in full, so I'm considering submitting a documentation pull request. In the meantime, I live off the conftest.py search results.

pytest is Plug-In Driven

One feature I really like about pytest is that much of it's default capabilities are driven by about 20 plug-ins. It's a sign of maturity that not only does it have plug-ins, but that most of the time this feature is transparent. You can add new plug-ins to your project in a number of ways, including pip installation from PyPI. For locally defined plug-ins I prefer to rely on explicit conftest.py declarations:

# conftest.py
collect_ignore = ["setup.py", "conftest.py"]
pytest_plugins = ["dream_plugin", "dream.utils.testplugin"]

There are a lot of third-party pytest plug-ins, which brings me to the next major section: Integration with other tools and frameworks.

Django Integration is Just a Plug-In Away

If you want to use pytest instead of Django's test runner and also get the power of function-based tests, fixture functions, improved test discover, and all the stuff I haven't covered, then check out and/or pip install pytest-django. My admittedly brief usage on some of my existing projects has demonstrating that my existing unittest-style tests work.

That previous tests still function means that as with a pure Python project, I can rely on existing unittests and write all my new tests as functions. I guess I could say that my existing Django projects just got much easier to maintain.

A good example of using pytest with Django can be found in django-braces' tox.ini file.

Twisted (and more) Integration is Just a Plug-In Away

The same goes for Twisted thanks to pytest-twisted. There is also a Pyramid plug-in that was just released. I'm not sure if Flask needs it, but I guess there will be Flask plug-in soon.

Integration With setup.py

Fortunately, the documentation for pytest covers both adding a new setup.py command-classes for pytest and actual integration. That's handy, but what I've found even more useful is the setup.py that Jeff Knupp wrote for his Sandman project.

Note: If you aren't experienced with writing Python packages and readying them for PyPI, I recommend you read Jeff Knupp's blog post on open sourcing projects. Amongst other things, it has an in-depth discussion about integration of pytest with setup.py. Anything I would write on the subject of setup.py integration would be just a cheap knock-off of Jeff's excellent work.

Summary

Tests are an important part of any project. While they increase the stability of a project, that unfortunately can come at the cost of the boredom of writing tests. Fortunately, pytest goes a long way to alleviating that boredom while also empowering Python code authors with lots of additional useful tools. I'm delighted to have finally discovered pytest. In the short time I've used pytest, it's saved me days, if not weeks, of tedious work.


Tags: python django testing
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