utest 0.0.1

utest is a tiny unit testing library for Python.

writeup v0 Dedicated to the public domain under CC0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

# utest

utest is a tiny library for unit testing in Python. It is available via pip for easy distribution. Alternatively, the module can be freely copied into a project. utest has no dependencies beyond the Python standard library.

utest currently only supports Python 3; pull requests to support Python 2 as well are welcome.

# License

utest dedicated to the public domain. It is written and maintained by George King.

# Installation $ pip3 install utest

# Usage

Tests are written as standalone scripts that call the utest functions utest and utest_exc. Typical invocations look like this: | utest(expected_value, fn_to_test, arg0, arg1, kw2=arg2, …) | utest_exc(expected_exception, fn_to_test, arg0, arg1, kw2=arg2, …)

The utest function takes as arguments an expected return value, followed by a function to test and any number of positional and keyword arguments. The function is called with the provided arguments inside of a try/except block, and the return value is compared to the expected value.

The ‘utest_exc’ function is similar, except that the expectation is that the function under test raise an exception. Note that because Python does not implement value equality for exceptions, utest_exc implements its own exception comparison. Currently this compares types and the args property of the expected and actual exceptions. Improvements to this comparison may prove to be necessary, as various exception types may set attributes that are not represented in args.

When an expectation is not met, utest prints a message to stderr, and increments the failure count. When the process exits, if failures have occured, then an atexit handler set by the utest module prints a summary message and forces a hard exit with status 1. (Note that as of Python 3.5.2, atexit suppresses SystemExit exceptions raised in handlers, which is unfortunate because it means that utest must use _exit to return a status code of 1, thereby bypassing any lower atexit handlers. If your unit tests require other atexit handlers to run, then make sure to include utest at the very top of the __main__ file of your test process).

See the unit tests for more examples.

# Testing utest

utest is itself tested using iotest, a process-based integration test harness. iotest is also available via pip: $ pip3 install iotest

To run the tests: $ iotest test/

# Issues

Please file issues to the github repository: github.com/gwk/utest.