Month: January 2018

I had a battle to get my testing directory structure to work outside of an IDE. Please find my solution below. Tested on Windows 7 using python 3.6 and Linux Mint using python 3.4, running the code using the command line:

python -m pytest test_compress_files.py

The file I wrote to be tested is called compress_files.py in a directory named \src. The file containing tests to be run using pytest is called test_compress_files.py in a subdirectory \tests, so the full directory path is \src\tests. I needed to add a file called context.py to the \src\tests directory. This file is used in test_compress_files.py to enable access to compress_files.py in the directory above. The __init__.py files are empty.

Directory structure:

\src
__init__.py
compress_files.py

\src\tests
__init__.py
context.py
test_compress_files.py  

compress_files.py contains the script to be tested.

context.py:

import os
import sys
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '..')))

import compress_files  

The line:

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__)

comes from the suggestion at the hitch hikers guide to python at:

http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/writing/structure/.

This adds the path of the directory above the /src/tests directory to sys.path, which in this case is /src.

test_compress_files.py:

import os
import pytest
from .context import compress_files
from compress_files import *

# tests start here
...

I put this up as an answer to a stackoverflow question here.