Mocking two functions with patch for a unit test

Question

I have a function I want to unit test contains calls two other functions. I am unsure how can I mock both functions at the same time properly using patch. I have provided an

Answer 1

In addition to the response @Matti John you can also use patch inside function test_write_out:

from mock import MagicMock, patch

def test_write_out():
    path = '~/collection'
    with patch('__builtin__.open') as mock_open, \
            patch('cPickle.dump') as mock_pickle:

        f = mock_open.return_value
        ...

Answer 2

You can simplify your test by using the patch decorator and nesting them like so (they are MagicMock objects by default):

@patch('cPickle.dump')
@patch('__builtin__.open')
def test_write_out(mock_open, mock_pickle):
    path = '~/collection'
    f = mock_open.return_value
    f.method.return_value = path

    write_out(path, 'data')

    mock_open.assert_called_once_with('~/collection', 'wb')
    mock_pickle.assert_called_once_with('data', f)
    f.close.assert_any_call()

Calls to a MagicMock instance return a new MagicMock instance, so you can check that the returned value was called just like any other mocked object. In this case f is a MagicMock named 'open()' (try printing f).

Answer 3

Here's a simple example on how to test raising ConflictError in create_collection function using mock:

import os
from unittest import TestCase
from mock import patch
from ..program.data import ConflictError, create_collection


class TestCreateCollection(TestCase):
    def test_path_exists(self):
        with patch.object(os.path, 'exists') as mock_method:
            mock_method.return_value = True

            self.assertRaises(ConflictError, create_collection, 'test')

Please, also see mock docs and Michael Foord's awesome introduction to mock.