Python Testing with pytest

Marking Test Functions

pytest provides a cool mechanism to let you put markers on test functions. A test can have more than one marker, and a marker can be on multiple tests.

Markers make sense after you see them in action. Let’s say we want to run a subset of our tests as a quick “smoke test” to get a sense for whether or not there is some major break in the system. Smoke tests are by convention not all-inclusive, thorough test suites, but a select subset that can be run quickly and give a developer a decent idea of the health of all parts of the system.

To add a smoke test suite to the Tasks project, we can add @mark.pytest.smoke to some of the tests. Let’s add it to a couple of tests in test_api_exceptions.py (note that the markers smoke ...