Using the pytest-mock plugin

After hearing about it from Brian Okken, I today tried out the pytest-mock plugin. It is surprisingly simple to use and useful, too.

The other day I wrote about mocks in Django views. The example test uses the with statement for patching the object.

from mock import patch

def test_detail_view(client):
    """Test the detail view for a Potato object with the Django test client."""
    potato = PotatoFactory.build()
    
    with patch.object(PotatoDetailView, 'get_object', return_value=potato):
        
        url = reverse('detail', kwargs={'pk': 1234})  # pk can be anything
        
        ...             

This works fine when only one patch is applied, but probably gets tedious quickly with more than one.

Enter: the pytest-mock plugin and its mocker fixture. Using this fixture, the test looks much cleaner.

def test_detail_view_with_mocker(client, mocker):
    """Same test as above, but using the mocker fixture from pytest-mock."""
    potato = PotatoFactory.build()
    
    # This is new
    mocker.patch.object(PotatoDetailView, 'get_object', return_value=potato)
    
    url = reverse('detail', kwargs={'pk': 1234})
    
    [...]

pytest awesomeness!