Prevent all python unittests from running based on environment variable

Question

Is there a way I could prevent all unit tests from running if a certain environment variable is not set to a specific value?

For example I want tests to only run if os.getenv(DB_URL) returns sqlite:///:memory:.

I'd like to configure this globally so I don't need to review every single test class / setup function to check this individually.

Not really because I would like to enforce it to be a check on all tests which is run before a setup method that may delete data eg. from a database. Manually having to confirm that the method is decorated with the checks for each test would be very annoying. — Hans, May 04 '22 at 14:27
So you want to execute the test runner, and immediately exit? Why not just not execute the test runner? — chepner, May 04 '22 at 16:02

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '22 at 15:59

There's many ways to accomplish this, but a fixture is probably the easiest

import os
import pytest

DB_URL = "foo"

@pytest.fixture(autouse=True, scope="session")
def verify_db_url():
    expected_url = "sqlite:///:memory:"
    if os.getenv(DB_URL) != expected_url:
        pytest.exit("Exiting due to incorrect database environment variable.")

Prevent all python unittests from running based on environment variable

1 Answers1