Python Testing with pytest

Using Plugins to Assist Mocking

This chapter has focused on using unittest.mock directly. However, there are many plugins that help with mocking, such as pytest-mock, which is a general-purpose plugin that provides a mocker fixture that acts as a thin wrapper around unittest.mock. One benefit of using pytest-mock is that the fixture cleans up after itself, so you don’t have to use a with block, as we did in our examples.

There are also several special-purpose mocking libraries that should be considered if their focus matches what you are testing:

• For mocking database access, try pytest-postgresql, pytest-mongo, pytest-mysql, and pytest-dynamodb.

• For mocking HTTP servers, try pytest-httpserver.

• For mocking requests, try responses and betamax ...