Python Testing with pytest

Starting with a Cool Idea

Maybe “cool idea” is too strong a phrase. An idea doesn’t have to be really that cool to deserve being made into a plugin. It just needs to be helpful. You may have a fixture or command-line flag that’s useful on one project, and you want to use on other projects. That’s good enough for plugin-hood.

As an example, we’ll grab an idea from the pytest documentation about slow tests. The pytest documentation^[55] includes an examples page with a description of how to skip tests that are marked with @pytest.mark.slow automatically.

Here’s the idea (the documentation actually uses --runslow, but we’ll use --slow because it’s shorter and seems like a better flag to me):

• Mark tests with @pytest.mark.slow that are so slow you ...