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A fast alternative to freezegun that wraps libfaketime.

Project description

https://img.shields.io/travis/simon-weber/python-libfaketime.svg https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/libfaketime.svg

python-libfaketime is a wrapper of libfaketime for python. Some brief details:

  • Linux and OS X, Pythons 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6.

  • Mostly compatible with freezegun.

  • Microsecond resolution.

  • Accepts datetimes and strings that can be parsed by dateutil.

  • Not threadsafe.

  • Will break profiling. A workaround: use libfaketime.{begin, end}_callback to disable/enable your profiler (nosetest example).

Installation

$ pip install libfaketime

Usage

import datetime
from libfaketime import fake_time, reexec_if_needed

# libfaketime needs to be preloaded by the dynamic linker.
# This will exec the same command, but with the proper environment variables set.
# You can also skip this and manually manage your env (see "How to avoid re-exec").
reexec_if_needed()

def test_datetime_now():

    # fake_time can be used as a context_manager
    with fake_time('1970-01-01 00:00:01'):

        # Every calls to a date or datetime function returns the mocked date
        assert datetime.datetime.utcnow() == datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1)
        assert datetime.datetime.now() == datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1)
        assert time.time() == 1


# fake_time can also be used as a decorator
@fake_time('1970-01-01 00:00:01', tz_offset=12)
def test_datetime_now_with_offset():

    # datetime.utcnow returns the mocked datetime without offset
    assert datetime.datetime.utcnow() == datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1)

    # datetime.now returns the mocked datetime with the offset passed to fake_time
    assert datetime.datetime.now() == datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 12, 0, 1)

Performance

libfaketime tends to be significantly faster than freezegun. Here’s the output of a totally unscientific benchmark on my laptop:

$ python benchmark.py
re-exec with libfaketime dependencies
timing 1000 executions of <class 'libfaketime.fake_time'>
0.021755 seconds

$ python benchmark.py freezegun
timing 1000 executions of <function freeze_time at 0x10aaa1140>
6.561472 seconds

Use with py.test

The pytest-libfaketime plugin will automatically configure python-libfaketime for you:

$ pip install pytest-libfaketime

Alternatively, you can reexec manually from inside the pytest_configure hook:

# conftest.py
import os
import libfaketime

def pytest_configure():
    libfaketime.reexec_if_needed()
    _, env_additions = libfaketime.get_reload_information()
    os.environ.update(env_additions)

Migration from freezegun

python-libfaketime should have the same behavior as freezegun when running on supported code. To migrate to it, you can run:

find . -type f -name "*.py" -exec sed -i 's/freezegun/libfaketime/g' "{}" \;

How to avoid re-exec

In some cases - especially when your tests start other processes - re-execing can cause unexpected problems. To avoid this, you can preload the necessary environment variables yourself. The necessary environment for your system can be found by running python-libfaketime on the command line:

$ python-libfaketime
export LD_PRELOAD="/home/foo/<snip>/vendor/libfaketime/src/libfaketime.so.1"
export FAKETIME_DID_REEXEC=true

You can easily put this in a script like:

$ eval $(python-libfaketime)
$ pytest  # ...or any other code that imports libfaketime

Contributing and testing

Contributions are welcome! You should compile libfaketime before running tests:

make -C libfaketime/vendor/libfaketime

Then you can install requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt and use pytest and tox to run the tests.

Known Issues

It was found that calling uuid.uuid1() multiple times while in a fake_time context could result in a deadlock. This situation only occured for users with a system level uuid1 library. In order to combat this issue, python-libfaketime temporarily disables the system level library by patching _uuid_generate_time to None while in the fake_time context.

Changelog

Semantic versioning is used.

0.5.2

released 2018-05-19

  • fix a bug causing incorrect times after unpatching under python 3.6+: #43

  • fix compilation under gcc8: #44

0.5.1

released 2018-01-19

  • fix usage as a class decorator : #41

0.5.0

released 2017-09-10

  • alias fake_time for freeze_time: #31

  • add tz_offset parameter: #36

0.4.4

released 2017-07-16

  • allow contextlib2 as an alternative to contextdecorator: #30

0.4.3

released 2017-07-07

  • add macOS Sierra compatibility: #29

0.4.2

released 2016-06-30

  • fix only_main_thread=False: #24

0.4.1

released 2016-05-02

  • fix deadlocks from uuid.uuid1 when faking time: #14

  • remove contextdecorator dependency on python3: #15

0.4.0

released 2016-04-02

  • freezegun’s tick() is now supported; see their docs for usage.

0.3.0

released 2016-03-04

  • invoking libfaketime from the command line will now print the necessary environment to avoid a re-exec.

0.2.1

released 2016-03-01

  • python 3 support

0.1.1

released 2015-09-11

0.1.0

released 2015-06-23

  • add global start/stop callbacks

0.0.3

released 2015-03-28

  • initial packaged release

Project details


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