Monkey patching a class in another module in Python

Question

I\'m working with a module written by someone else. I\'d like to monkey patch the __init__ method of a class defined in the module. The examples I have found sh

Answer 1

Here is an example I came up with to monkeypatch Popen using pytest.

import the module:

# must be at module level in order to affect the test function context
from some_module import helpers

A MockBytes object:

class MockBytes(object):

    all_read = []
    all_write = []
    all_close = []

    def read(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # print('read', args, kwargs, dir(self))
        self.all_read.append((self, args, kwargs))

    def write(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # print('wrote', args, kwargs)
        self.all_write.append((self, args, kwargs))

    def close(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # print('closed', self, args, kwargs)
        self.all_close.append((self, args, kwargs))

    def get_all_mock_bytes(self):
        return self.all_read, self.all_write, self.all_close

A MockPopen factory to collect the mock popens:

def mock_popen_factory():
    all_popens = []

    class MockPopen(object):

        def __init__(self, args, stdout=None, stdin=None, stderr=None):
            all_popens.append(self)
            self.args = args
            self.byte_collection = MockBytes()
            self.stdin = self.byte_collection
            self.stdout = self.byte_collection
            self.stderr = self.byte_collection
            pass

    return MockPopen, all_popens

And an example test:

def test_copy_file_to_docker():
    MockPopen, all_opens = mock_popen_factory()
    helpers.Popen = MockPopen # replace builtin Popen with the MockPopen
    result = copy_file_to_docker('asdf', 'asdf')
    collected_popen = all_popens.pop()
    mock_read, mock_write, mock_close = collected_popen.byte_collection.get_all_mock_bytes()
    assert mock_read
    assert result.args == ['docker', 'cp', 'asdf', 'some_container:asdf']

This is the same example, but using pytest.fixture it overrides the builtin Popen class import within helpers:

@pytest.fixture
def all_popens(monkeypatch): # monkeypatch is magically injected

    all_popens = []

    class MockPopen(object):
        def __init__(self, args, stdout=None, stdin=None, stderr=None):
            all_popens.append(self)
            self.args = args
            self.byte_collection = MockBytes()
            self.stdin = self.byte_collection
            self.stdout = self.byte_collection
            self.stderr = self.byte_collection
            pass
    monkeypatch.setattr(helpers, 'Popen', MockPopen)

    return all_popens


def test_copy_file_to_docker(all_popens):    
    result = copy_file_to_docker('asdf', 'asdf')
    collected_popen = all_popens.pop()
    mock_read, mock_write, mock_close = collected_popen.byte_collection.get_all_mock_bytes()
    assert mock_read
    assert result.args == ['docker', 'cp', 'asdf', 'fastload_cont:asdf']