I want to make my pytest unittests run with the "python setup.py test" command

Question

In the default behaviour giving the command python setup.py test will execute the unit tests associated with a module. This default behaviour can be made to work simply by providing a list of test-suite modules.

The alternative (but now obsolete) Nose test runner has a comparable feature - you can just provide the string nose.collector which gives the test command the ability to auto-discover the tests associated with the project.

But what if I'm using pytest? There doesn't seem to be a documented pattern to run tests from the setup.py file. Is this a behaviour supported by the pytest library?

Dmitry Tokarev Dmitry Tokarev · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-11T19:24:16

I personally have not done this. But I'd recommend checking out some legit python projects on github to see how they have done this. E.g. requests:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

from setuptools import setup
from setuptools.command.test import test as TestCommand


class PyTest(TestCommand):
    user_options = [('pytest-args=', 'a', "Arguments to pass into py.test")]

    def initialize_options(self):
        TestCommand.initialize_options(self)
        self.pytest_args = []

    def finalize_options(self):
        TestCommand.finalize_options(self)
        self.test_args = []
        self.test_suite = True

    def run_tests(self):
        import pytest

        errno = pytest.main(self.pytest_args)
        sys.exit(errno)

setup(
    # pass all the required/desired args
    cmdclass={'test': PyTest}
)

You can even pass args to pytest runner python setup.py test --pytest-args='-vvv'

Also checkout the docs: https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/goodpractices.html#integrating-with-setuptools-python-setup-py-test-pytest-runner (thanks to @jonrsharpe for the link)

I want to make my pytest unittests run with the "python setup.py test" command

1 Answers