When writing code it is always a good idea to write testable code or easy to test code. However, sometimes you need to test code, which is not as easy to test as wanted. A useful trick that can assist you while testing code is monkeypatching global variables.
Suppose you have the following script.py:
from pathlib import Path
data_directory = Path(__file__).parent / "data"
print(data_directory)
The data_directory may be used for finding data resources or saving new files.
However, when testing this code, you do not want to modify the documents in the data directory.
Instead, a temporary directory should be used, where additional temporary files can be created.
To do so, the data_directoryvariable needs to be overwritten in tests.
Fortunately, we can utilise pytest's monkeypatch fixture:
# test.py
import script
def test_overwrite_data_dir(tmp_path, monkeypatch) -> None:
data_directory = tmp_path / "data"
monkeypatch.setattr(script, "data_directory", data_directory)
assert data_directory == script.data_directory
Groups: pytest