Testing in python can be fun too!

Humble beginning

I come from (lately) Ruby,  Java and Clojure and currently I’m working with some python projects and I was missing the way I used to test my code with rspec.  After a quick research, I found three great projects that helps to make more readable tests, they are: py.test, Mock and sure.

Better assertions

I was missing a better way to make asserts into my tests. The option about using the plain assert is good but not enough and by using sure I could do some awesome code looking similar to rspec.

#instead of plain old assert
assert add(1, 4) == 5
#I'm empowered by
add(1, 4).should.be.equals(5)
['chip8', 'schip8', 'chip16'].shouldnt.be.empty
[1, 2, 3, 4].should.have.length_of(4)

And this makes all the difference, my test code now is more expressive.

Struggling with monkeypatch

The other challenge I was facing was to understand and use monkeypatch for mocks and stubs.  I find easier to use the Mock library even though its @patch looks similar to monkeypatch but I could grasp it quickly.

def test_simple_math_remotely_stubed():
  server = Mock()
  server.computes_add = Mock(return_value=3)

  add_remotely(1, 2, server).should.be.equals(3)

def test_simple_math_remotely_mocked():
  server = Mock()

  add_remotely(1, 2, server)

  server.computes_add.assert_called_once_with(1, 2)

#Stubing an internal dependency
def test_simple_math_with_randon_generated_by_nasa(nasa_random_generator):

  add_and_sum_with_rnd(3, 9).should.be.equals(54)

#Mocking an internal dependency
def test_simple_math_that_sends_email(mailer_mock):
  add_and_sends_email(3, 9)

          subject='Complex addition',
          body='The result was 12')

Make sure you

  1. Are using virtualenv for better lib version managment
  2. Have installed pytest, sure and mock
  3. Git cloned the project above to understand it.

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