override python function-local variable in unittest

Question

I have a method in python (2.7) that does foo, and gives up after 5 minutes if foo didn\'t work.

def keep_trying(self):
    timeout = 300  #empirically derived,          


        

Answer 1

You can't mock a function's local variable. To make your code easier to test, change it to, e.g:

def keep_trying(self, timeout=300):
    end_time = time.time() + timeout
    # etc, as above

so it becomes trivial for tests to run it with a shorter timeout!