Installing and Using plugins

This section talks about installing and using third party plugins. For writing your own plugins, please refer to Writing plugins.

Installing a third party plugin can be easily done with pip:

pip install pytest-NAME
pip uninstall pytest-NAME

If a plugin is installed, pytest automatically finds and integrates it, there is no need to activate it.

Here is a little annotated list for some popular plugins:

• pytest-django: write tests for django apps, using pytest integration.
• pytest-twisted: write tests for twisted apps, starting a reactor and processing deferreds from test functions.
• pytest-catchlog: to capture and assert about messages from the logging module
• pytest-cov: coverage reporting, compatible with distributed testing
• pytest-xdist: to distribute tests to CPUs and remote hosts, to run in boxed mode which allows to survive segmentation faults, to run in looponfailing mode, automatically re-running failing tests on file changes, see also xdist: pytest distributed testing plugin
• pytest-instafail: to report failures while the test run is happening.
• pytest-bdd and pytest-konira to write tests using behaviour-driven testing.
• pytest-timeout: to timeout tests based on function marks or global definitions.
• pytest-pep8: a --pep8 option to enable PEP8 compliance checking.
• pytest-flakes: check source code with pyflakes.
• oejskit: a plugin to run javascript unittests in live browsers.

To see a complete list of all plugins with their latest testing status against different py.test and Python versions, please visit plugincompat.

You may also discover more plugins through a pytest- pypi.python.org search.

Requiring/Loading plugins in a test module or conftest file

You can require plugins in a test module or a conftest file like this:

pytest_plugins = "myapp.testsupport.myplugin",

When the test module or conftest plugin is loaded the specified plugins will be loaded as well.

pytest_plugins = “myapp.testsupport.myplugin”

which will import the specified module as a pytest plugin.

Finding out which plugins are active

If you want to find out which plugins are active in your environment you can type:

py.test --traceconfig

and will get an extended test header which shows activated plugins and their names. It will also print local plugins aka conftest.py files when they are loaded.

Deactivating / unregistering a plugin by name

You can prevent plugins from loading or unregister them:

py.test -p no:NAME

This means that any subsequent try to activate/load the named plugin will not work.

If you want to unconditionally disable a plugin for a project, you can add this option to your pytest.ini file:

[pytest]
addopts = -p no:NAME

Alternatively to disable it only in certain environments (for example in a CI server), you can set PYTEST_ADDOPTS environment variable to -p no:name.

See Finding out which plugins are active for how to obtain the name of a plugin.

Pytest default plugin reference

You can find the source code for the following plugins in the pytest repository.

_pytest.assertion	support for presenting detailed information in failing assertions.
_pytest.cacheprovider
_pytest.capture
_pytest.config
_pytest.doctest
_pytest.genscript	(deprecated) generate a single-file self-contained version of pytest
_pytest.helpconfig
_pytest.junitxml
_pytest.mark	generic mechanism for marking and selecting python functions.
_pytest.monkeypatch	monkeypatching and mocking functionality.
_pytest.nose
_pytest.pastebin
_pytest.pdb
_pytest.pytester
_pytest.python
_pytest.recwarn
_pytest.resultlog	log machine-parseable test session result information in a plain
_pytest.runner
_pytest.main
_pytest.skipping
_pytest.terminal
_pytest.tmpdir
_pytest.unittest