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2021-04-04

In this post Peter describes an effective, graceful way of differentiating between unit and integration tests in a Go codebase. While build tags and the standard tooling around tests might be Go related, I believe that the pattern applies to other ecosystems as well. For instance Python and Pytest.

Pytest makes this easy using the skipif mark:

import os
import pytest


def test_unit():
    assert True


@pytest.mark.skipif(os.getenv("DB") == None, reason="Env var DB not set")
def test_integration():
    assert True

And there’s an even more convenient way with a reusable annotation:

needs_db = pytest.mark.skipif(os.getenv("DB") == None, reason="Env var DB not set")


@needs_db
def test_integration():
    assert True

Now running either pytest -v or pytest -rs without setting the environment variable hints at why the test is skipped:

test_me.py::test_unit PASSED
test_me.py::test_integration SKIPPED (Env var DB not set)

Overall this seems like a very reasonable way to separate unit from integration tests in a straightforward and discoverable way.

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