Testing demo: pytest using classes


In our third example we are going to use the pytest module. The only drawback of the pytest module is that it does not come with the installation of Python itself. It is not a huge issue though as you probably install hundreds of other modules as well.

These days Pytest seems like the most popular testing library for Python.

We'll have several examples using Pytest.

In order to use it you'd create a file with a name that starts with test_ prefix. We need to import the module we are testing but we don't need to import pytest. Actually we don't even use pytest inside the code. (At least not in the simple use-cases.) In the file you need to create a class starting with Test, but this class does not need to inherit from any special class. In the class we can have one or more test-functions starting with the prefix test_. In the function we call the function we are testing and we compare the results to the expected results.

We use the built-in assert function of Python to check if the results were true.

No need to learn various specialized assert-statements as we had in the unittest module.

We run the test using the pytest command.

We'll get some output. Here too the single dot after the name of the test file indicates that there was one successful test function.

The exit-code of this execution in 0 as was the case with unittest.


pip install pytest


examples/testing-demo/test_with_pytest_class.py
import mymath

class TestMath():
    def test_math(self):
        assert mymath.add(2, 2) == 4

============================= test session starts ==============================
platform linux -- Python 3.8.2, pytest-5.4.2, py-1.8.1, pluggy-0.13.1
rootdir: /home/gabor/work/slides/python/examples/testing-demo
plugins: flake8-1.0.6
collected 1 item

test_with_pytest_class.py .                                              [100%]

============================== 1 passed in 0.01s ===============================


$ pytest test_with_pytest_class.py
$ echo $?
0


> pytest test_with_pytest_class.py
> echo %ERRORLEVEL%
0