Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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pytest: no-boilerplate testing (part 2)

In my previous blog post I covered test discovery and writing basic tests using pytest. Today I'm going to cover a few more features that I really enjoy: raises and fixtures.

The Intuitively Named raises context manager

When using pytest, you can assert whether or not an exception occurred via the following:

# test_exceptions.py
from pytest import raises

def test_an_exception():
    with raises(IndexError):
        # Indexing the 30th item in a 3 item list
        [5, 10, 15][30]

class CustomException(Exception):
    pass

def test_my_exception():
    with raises(CustomException):
        raise CustomException

This is similar to, but just a bit easier to remember than the implementation in unittest.

What I like about it is that even if I step away from code and tests for enough time to go on vacation and get married, when I come back I always remember the precise name of the context manager used to raise exceptions.

Fixtures as Function Arguments

When writing tests, it's not uncommon to need common objects used between tests. However, if you have a complicated process to generate these common objects, then you have to write tests for your tests. When using Python's venerable unittest framework, this always causes a spaghetti-code headache. However, via the virtue of simplicity, pytest helps keep our test code cleaner and more maintainable.

Rather than try and explain that further, I'll write some code to get my point across:

# test_fixtures.py
from pytest import fixture

@fixture  # Registering this function as a fixture.
def complex_data():
    # Creating test data entirely in this function to isolate it
    #   from the rest of this module.
    class DataTypes(object):
        string = str
        list = list
    return DataTypes()

def test_types(complex_data): # fixture is passed as an argument
    assert isinstance("Elephant", complex_data.string)
    assert isinstance([5, 10, 15], complex_data.list)

Nice and simple, which is how I think test harnesses should operate.

Writing Tests for Fixtures

Let's pretend that the complex_data() is a terribly sophisticated function in it's own right. It's so sophisticated that I can't determine what it's actually doing, and I start to get worried. Fortunately, because the complex_data() argument itself is written as a function, I can easily write a test for it.

# test_fixtures.py
# note: this version of test_fixtures.py is built off the previous example

def test_complex_data(complex_data):
    assert isinstance(complex_data, object)
    assert complex_data.string == str
    assert complex_data.list == list

Now that I can easily write tests for my fixtures, that means I can refactor them! I can replace difficult-to-use libraries with easier ones, break up giant functions into little ones, and generally simplify the unnecessarily complex.

If you've ever been in that weird place where a unittest setUp() method is indecipherable, you know just how useful this can be.

Scoping Fixtures

What if I want a fixture that shares it's scope across several test functions?

# test_fixtures_with_scope.py
from pytest import fixture

@fixture(scope="module")  # Registering fixture with module-level scope
def scope_data():
    return {"count": 0}

def test_first(scope_data):
    assert scope_data["count"] == 0
    scope_data["count"] += 1

def test_second(scope_data):
    assert scope_data["count"] == 1

Executing Teardown Code

I can tear down data structures in them. This is useful for any sort of data binding, including file management.

# test_fixtures_with_teardown.py
from pytest import fixture

@fixture
def file_data(request): # The fixture MUST have a 'request' argument
    text = open("data.txt", "w")

    @request.addfinalizer
    def teardown():
        text.close()
    return text

def test_data_type(file_data):
    assert isinstance(file_data, file)

What's really nice about this teardown feature is that when combined with the fixture decorator's scope argument, I can exactly control when fixtures are taken down. This is an amazing piece of control. While I can and have duplicated this behavior using unittest, with pytest I can do it with more obvious code.

More pytext Fixture Features

Want to know more things you can do with pytest fixtures? Please read the pytest fixtures documentation

More to Come

In my next blog post I describe usage of the following pytest features:

  • Changing behavior of pytest with pytest.ini and plug-ins.
  • Integration with Django and other frameworks.
  • Integration with setup.py

Tags: python django testing
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