How to modularize your py.test fixtures

pytest-fixture-modularization.md

Using py.test is great and the support for test fixtures is pretty awesome. However, in order to share your fixtures across your entire module, py.test suggests you define all your fixtures within one single conftest.py file. This is impractical if you have a large quantity of fixtures -- for better organization and readibility, you would much rather define your fixtures across multiple, well-named files. But how do you do that? ...No one on the internet seemed to know.

Turns out, however, you can define fixtures in individual files like this:

tests/fixtures/add.py

import pytest

@pytest.fixture
def add(x, y):
    x + y

Then you can import these fixtures in your conftest.py:

tests/conftest.py

import pytest
from fixtures.add import add

...and then you're good to test!

tests/adding_test.py

import pytest

@pytest.mark.usefixtures("add")
def test_adding(add):
    assert add(2, 3) == 5

Because of the modularity, tests will have to be run with python -m py.test instead of py.test directly.

You can simply create "local pytest plugins" which can be nothing more than Python files with fixtures, e.g.

* tests/unit/conftest.py:
  ```python
  pytest_plugins = [
     "tests.unit.fixtures.some_stuff",
  ]

• tests/unit/fixtures/some_stuff.py:

  import pytest
  
  @pytest.fixture
  def foo():
      return 'foobar'

Thanks for you idea @ikonst! Just made my conftest as package and add it as plugin!

Can you share how did you share the conftest as a package? Can that package be pip installed across other repo/projects?

There's no much difference between a conftest.py and a pytest plugin (only one I can think of, is that a top-level conftest can have a pytest_plugins section).

If you want to make a Python package with pytest fixtures, see https://docs.pytest.org/en/6.2.x/writing_plugins.html

Hello everyone, thank you for all the insightful comments.
If you use PyCharm, it seems that, for now, you won't be able to use the glob approach because of this issue, which cleans up the "unused import" needed with this approach.

My recommendation would be to use the hard-coded list and maintain the conftest.py file.
With this, you also do not need to import the fixture in your test file.

Otherwise, here's a summary of the above:

tests/conftest.py

from glob import glob
def _as_module(fixture_path: str) -> str:
    return fixture_path.replace("/", ".").replace("\\", ".").replace(".py", "")


pytest_plugins = [
    _as_module(fixture) for fixture in glob("tests/fixtures/[!_]*.py")
]

tests/fixtures/example.py

@pytest.fixture()
def example():
    return []

tests/unit/mytest.py

# If you did not hardcode pytest_plugins, you might need `from tests.fixtures.example import example`
def test_get_a_list(example):
    assert isinstance(example, list)

pytest_plugins

It worked like a charm, thank you.

Great gist on modularization of conftest, it works great, thanks!

And thanks to @ryanjdillon for the tip about init.py, it solved a mypy problem for me.

Another option would be to have multiple nested directories/packages containing your tests, and each directory can have its own conftest.py with its own fixtures, adding on to the ones provided by the conftest.py files in parent directories as written in the official doc here