Importing correctly with pytest

Question

I just got set up to use pytest with Python 2.6. It has worked well so far with the exception of handling \"import\" statements: I can\'t seem to get pytest to respond to im

Answer 1

I was wondering what to do about this problem too. After reading this post, and playing around a bit, I figured out an elegant solution. I created a file called "test_setup.py" and put the following code in it:

import sys, os
sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

I put this file in the top-level directory (such as src). When pytest is run from the top-level directory, it will run all test files including this one since the file is prefixed with "test". There are no tests in the file, but it is still run since it begins with "test".

The code will append the current directory name of the test_setup.py file to the system path within the test environment. This will be done only once, so there are not a bunch of things added to the path.

Then, from within any test function, you can import modules relative to that top-level folder (such as import geom.region) and it knows where to find it since the src directory was added to the path.

If you want to run a single test file (such as test_util.py) instead of all the files, you would use:

pytest test_setup.py test\test_util.py

This runs both the test_setup and test_util code so that the test_setup code can still be used.