Python unittest passing arguments

Question

In python how would I pass an argument from the command line to a unittest function. Here is the code so far… I know it\'s wrong.

class TestingClass(unittes         


        

Answer 1

So the doctors here that are saying "You say that hurts? Then don't do that!" are probably right. But if you really want to, here's one way of passing arguments to a unittest test:

import sys
import unittest

class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):
    USERNAME = "jemima"
    PASSWORD = "password"

    def test_logins_or_something(self):
        print('username : {}'.format(self.USERNAME))
        print('password : {}'.format(self.PASSWORD))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        MyTest.USERNAME = sys.argv.pop()
        MyTest.PASSWORD = sys.argv.pop()
    unittest.main()

that will let you run with:

python mytests.py ausername apassword

You need the argv.pops so your command line params don't mess with unittest's own...

[update] The other thing you might want to look into is using environment variables:

import os
import unittest

class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):
    USERNAME = "jemima"
    PASSWORD = "password"

    def test_logins_or_something(self):
        print('username : {}'.format(self.USERNAME))
        print('password : {}'.format(self.PASSWORD))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    MyTest.USERNAME = os.environ.get('TEST_USERNAME', MyTest.USERNAME)            
    MyTest.PASSWORD = os.environ.get('TEST_PASSWORD', MyTest.PASSWORD)
    unittest.main()

That will let you run with:

TEST_USERNAME=ausername TEST_PASSWORD=apassword python mytests.py

and it has the advantage that you're not messing with unittest's own argument parsing. downside is it won't work quite like that on Windows...