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Py.test Basics

Posted on Fri 27 April 2018 in Posts

So I'm fortunate enough to work for an employer who grants me access to Safari Books Online. The other day I was browsing the site to discover that they now have not only just books, but also online courses/webinars on a variety of topics.

I stumbled across this one on Py.test which is a tool that is increasingly gaining traction in the world of Python unit-testing, a world which I'm very much interested in. As such, took the plunge and did the webinar, and thought I'd recap some of the neat Py.test things that were new to me. Disclaimer: with the exception of a brief intro a colleague gave me at a previous job, I've had no experience with Py.test so this is all going to be pretty basic stuff.

Running tests

Initially I first heard of Py.test as an alternative test runner. The built in unittest module can be used for running your unit tests, but many people (myself included) will use nose as a tool for running their tests. For example, you might do something like the following to run your tests:

$ nosetests
..................................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 34 tests in 1.440s

OK

With Py.test you'd do something like (from within the project's directory):

$ PYTHONPATH=. pytest
========================================================================== test session starts ===========================================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.2, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/block, inifile:
collected 3 items

test_block/test_block.py ...                                                                                                                                       [100%]

======================================================================== 3 passed in 0.02 seconds ========================================================================

The output's quite different, but not in a bad way.

Tests as Functions

The first thing that'll jump out at you about Py.test is that it's encouraged to write your tests as functions, rather than methods in a class. In the base unittest module in Python it follows the typical xUnit style pattern of test organization: you create a class which inherits from some base class (unittest.TestCase in Python's unittest module), and then each individual unit test is a method on that class. So if you had a class Dog you might write a test class like the following:

class TestDog(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_speak(self):
        dog = Dog()
        result = dog.speak()
        self.assertEqual("bark!", result)

Certainly you can still write tests like this with Py.test (ie all old tests you have will still work just fine with Py.test), but instead you're encouraged to write your tests as standalone functions. So the above might look like:

def test_dog_speak():
    dog = Dog()
    result = dog.speak()
    assert "bark!" == result

Note as well another key difference: the use of Python's built-in assert statement rather than using the assert*() methods defined in unittest.TestCase since we're no longer inheriting from that class.

Sidebar: The assert Gotcha

The assert statement gotcha: in Python the assert statement is a statement, not a function, so this can trip people up when they pass a second argument to it. For example:

assert somecondition, "This gets printed out"

will print "This gets printed out" if somecondition is false, but this is not the same as:

assert(somecondition, "This gets printed out")

which always evaluates to true because it's treated as passing a 2-value tuple to the assert statement, and a non-empty tuple is truthy in Python. This is a classic Python gotcha. Py.test adds some smarts around this, if we had a test like:

def test_assert_with_tuple():
    assert (False == True, "Should be false")

Then we'd get output like:

========================================================================== test session starts ===========================================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.2, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/Integer, inifile:
collected 15 items

test/test_integr.py .............                                                                                                                               [100%]

============================================================================ warnings summary ============================================================================
test/test_integr.py:119
  assertion is always true, perhaps remove parentheses?

-- Docs: http://doc.pytest.org/en/latest/warnings.html
================================================================== 12 passed, 1 warnings in 0.11 seconds =================================================================

Note how Py.test warns us that we might be doing something dumb.

Testing Raised Exceptions

A common thing to do in unit tests is test if a particular exception is raised under certain circumstances. You can certainly do this in vanilla unittest:

class TestFoo(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_foo_throws_value_error_when_given_negative_number(self):
        # test will only pass if foo() raises ValueError
        with self.assertRaises(ValueError):
            foo(-1)

But again since we're no longer inheriting from unittest.TestCase how do we do this with Py.test? There's a couple ways, one is still with a context manager:

import pytest

def test_foo_throws_value_error_when_given_negative_number():
    # test will only pass if foo() raises ValueError
    with pytest.raises(ValueError):
        foo(-1)

Another is to "mark" the test as an expected failure:

@pytest.mark.xfail(raises=ValueError)
def test_foo_throws_value_error_when_given_negative_number():
    foo(-1)

The latter is slighly different, and this is reported in the test results as you'll see output like:

========================================================================== test session starts ===========================================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.2, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/Integer, inifile:
collected 15 items

test/test_integr.py ..x............                                                                                                                                [100%]

============================================================ 12 passed, 1 skipped, 1 xfailed in 0.12 seconds =============================================================

Note that 1 xfailed bit, indicating that there was a single test with an "expected" failure. This is effectively coding a way in which the SUT fails, but in an expected way. The docs suggest that:

Using pytest.raises is likely to be better for cases where you are testing exceptions your own code is deliberately raising, whereas using @pytest.mark.xfail with a check function is probably better for something like documenting unfixed bugs (where the test describes what “should” happen) or bugs in dependencies.

I could see this being useful for a test that's currently failing in a way you expect, you could comment the test out (but then you might as well delete it) or you could codify that you expect it to fail. The raises:ValueError) restricts the way you expect it to fail (for example if you expect it to throw a ValueError, and it throws a RuntimeError then that's not expected and should cause a test run failure).

Forcing a Failure

You can also force a test to fail:

def test_force_failure():
    # This test will always fail
    pytest.fail("this will fail")

This is effectively the same thing as adding self.assertEqual(True, False) in a vanilla Python unit test. I'm not sure where this would be useful, the instructor gave this example:

def test_import_error():
    try:
        import somethirdpartylibrary
    except ImportError:
        pytest.fail("No module named somethirdpartylibrary to import")

But I fail to see the benefit of this. If the import was missing, you'll still get test failures (in fact, presumably any test that needs somethirdpartylibrary will still blow up even with this test in place).

Approximations

Sometimes you want to test a floating point number for a particular value in a test, but because floating point values in any programming language are not precise, you effectively have to create a "tolerable range" to test against. For example in plain Python unitest you might do something like:

self.assertAlmostEqual(some_value, some_other_value, delta=0.001)

which would pass if some_value and some_other_value are within +/- 0.001 of each other. With Py.test you can do the following:

def test_approx_same():
    expected = 0.3
    result = 0.1 + 0.2
    assert pytest.approx(expected) == result

There's a bunch of flexibility around how to use approx and it works with more than just floating point numbers. The docs are quite good.

Marking Tests & Selective Test Execution

Oftentimes you want to group tests into various categories. For example you might want to separate unit tests from integration tests, or fast-running tests from slow-running tests, etc. Doing this in vanila unittest is kinda cumbersome, but with Py.test it's easy:

@pytest.mark.long
def test_this_takes_long():
    print("this is taking a long time....")
    import time ; time.sleep(10)
    assert True == True

@pytest.mark.fast
def test_this_is_fast():
    assert True == True

With tests like this you can run just the fast tests:

pytest -m fast

or just the slow tests:

pytest -m slow

Or even do some simple boolean logic, like for example anything that's not in the slow category:

pytest -m "not slow"

Really handy stuff.

You can also do fuzzy matching of tests by name, for example to run all the tests with the word "bad" in them:

pytest -k bad

This will collect & run tests with the word bad in the name (ex: test_bad(), test_that_the_bad_stuff_doesnt_happen(), etc). Really useful for when you just want to quickly run one or two specific tests.

Conditionally Skipping Tests

You can also conditionally skip tests:

@pytest.mark.skipif(
    sys.version_info < (3,6),
    reason="Requires Python 3.6"
)
def test_that_requires_python_3_6_because_f_strings():
    result = function_that_uses_f_strings()
    assert "some expected value" == result

Since the block in the skipif is arbitrary Python code, you could use this for something like running tests only if a particular environment variable is set, etc.

Parameterized Tests

This is where we really start to see some cool stuff. If you've ever written unit tests in jUnit you'll have probably at some point come across parameterized tests which is a really useful technique for reducing test boilerplate by separating test definition from test input data. Let's say we had a method add() that adds two numbers together & returns the result (I know it's a boring example, but it really illustrates the technique). You might write two tests for this function to test two positive numbers and two negative numbers:

class TestAdd(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_add_positive(self):
        expected = 4
        result = add(1, 3)
        self.assertEqual(expected, result)

    def test_add_negative(self):
        expected = -4
        result = add(-1, -3)
        self.assertEqual(expected, result)

Note that these two tests are identical save the expected and input values. Imagine if you could somehow make those parameters to a test, then you might do something like:

def test_add(x, y, expected_result):
    result = add(x, y)
    assert expected_result == result

The question then becomes how do we specify those input values. In Python 3.4 they added something like this with subTest (docs):

def test_add(self):
    values_to_test = [
        (1, 3, 4),
        (-1, -3, -4),
    ]
    for test_vals in values_to_test:
        with self.subTest(test_vals=test_vals):
            x,y,expected_result = test_vals
            result = add(x,y)
            self.assertEqual(expected_result, result)

But this is super clunky, the test data is within the test, obfuscating the meaning of the actual test. You also have to manually unpack everything, and when we run it, it ends up looking like a single test instead of two (so if one fails it's harder to figure out which one of the two tuples in values_to_test caused the failure).

Instead, with Py.test you can use the parametrize mark:

@pytest.mark.parametrize('x, y, expected_result', [
    (1, 3, 4),
    (-1, -3, -4),
])
def test_add(x, y, expected_result):
    result = add(x, y)
    assert expected_result == result

This is much cleaner, the test meaning is extremely clear, and if we use the -v flag when running the tests we can see that this produces two distinct tests for the two cases:

========================================================================== test session starts ===========================================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.2, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0 -- /Users/aparkin/.virtualenvs/pytestcourse/bin/python3.6
cachedir: .pytest_cache
rootdir: /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/Integer, inifile:
collected 2 items

test/test_integr.py::test_add[1-3-4] PASSED                                                                                                                        [ 50%]
test/test_integr.py::test_add[-1--3--4] PASSED                                                                                                                     [100%]

======================================================================== 2 passed in 0.02 seconds ========================================================================

Also note that the input itself for the test is in the test identifier (ie the [1-3-4] for the test which added 1 & 3 to get 4, etc).

Now adding additional test cases is a simple matter of adding another tuple to the parametrize decorator. That is: each new test becomes a single line. That's some super-concise test definition.

The docs on this illustrate more stuff you can do with it, I'm just barely scratching the surface.

Debugging

Another handy trick is that with the --pdb command-line argument you can actually have Py.test automatically drop into the pdb debugger on a failing test:

$ pytest -v --pdb
========================================================================== test session starts ===========================================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.2, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0 -- /Users/aparkin/.virtualenvs/pytestcourse/bin/python3.6
cachedir: .pytest_cache
rootdir: /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/Integer, inifile:
collected 4 items

test/test_integr.py::test_add[1-3-4] PASSED                                                                                                                        [ 25%]
test/test_integr.py::test_add[-1--3--4] PASSED                                                                                                                     [ 50%]
test/test_integr.py::test_fail FAILED                                                                                                                              [ 75%]
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> traceback >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    def test_fail():
        x = 2342423
>       assert 42 == 4234
E       assert 42 == 4234

test/test_integr.py:167: AssertionError
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> entering PDB >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> /Users/aparkin/temp/sandbox/pytestcourse/Integer/test/test_integr.py(167)test_fail()
-> assert 42 == 4234
(Pdb)

You can then use the usual pdb commands to try and figure how why a test is failing.

Other Stuff

There's way more to Py.test, things like Fixtures to replace the setUp & tearDown for classes, running doctests, and a million other options. Hopefully this is a good starting introduction.