# pytest-2.4.0: new fixture features/hooks and bug fixes

The just released pytest-2.4.0 brings many improvements and numerous bug fixes while remaining plugin- and test-suite compatible apart from a few supposedly very minor incompatibilities. See below for a full list of details. A few feature highlights:

- new yield-style fixtures pytest.yield_fixture, allowing to use existing with-style context managers in fixture functions.
- improved pdb support: `import pdb ; pdb.set_trace()` now works without requiring prior disabling of stdout/stderr capturing. Also the `--pdb` options works now on collection and internal errors and we introduced a new experimental hook for IDEs/plugins to intercept debugging: `pytest_exception_interact(node, call, report)`.
- shorter monkeypatch variant to allow specifying an import path as a target, for example: `monkeypatch.setattr("requests.get", myfunc)`
- better unittest/nose compatibility: all teardown methods are now only called if the corresponding setup method succeeded.
- integrate tab-completion on command line options if you have argcomplete configured.
- allow boolean expression directly with skipif/xfail if a “reason” is also specified.
- a new hook `pytest_load_initial_conftests` allows plugins like pytest-django to influence the environment before conftest files import `django`.
- reporting: color the last line red or green depending if failures/errors occurred or everything passed.

The documentation has been updated to accomodate the changes, see http://pytest.org

To install or upgrade pytest:

    pip install -U pytest # or
    easy_install -U pytest

Many thanks to all who helped, including Floris Bruynooghe, Brianna Laugher, Andreas Pelme, Anthon van der Neut, Anatoly Bubenkoff, Vladimir Keleshev, Mathieu Agopian, Ronny Pfannschmidt, Christian Theunert and many others.

may passing tests be with you,

holger krekel

## Changes between 2.3.5 and 2.4

known incompatibilities:

- if calling –genscript from python2.7 or above, you only get a standalone script which works on python2.7 or above. Use Python2.6 to also get a python2.5 compatible version.
- all xunit-style teardown methods (nose-style, pytest-style, unittest-style) will not be called if the corresponding setup method failed, see issue322 below.
- the pytest_plugin_unregister hook wasn’t ever properly called and there is no known implementation of the hook - so it got removed.
- pytest.fixture-decorated functions cannot be generators (i.e. use yield) anymore. This change might be reversed in 2.4.1 if it causes unforeseen real-life issues. However, you can always write and return an inner function/generator and change the fixture consumer to iterate over the returned generator. This change was done in lieu of the new `pytest.yield_fixture` decorator, see below.

new features:

- experimentally introduce a new `pytest.yield_fixture` decorator which accepts exactly the same parameters as pytest.fixture but mandates a `yield` statement instead of a `return statement` from fixture functions. This allows direct integration with “with-style” context managers in fixture functions and generally avoids registering of finalization callbacks in favour of treating the “after-yield” as teardown code. Thanks Andreas Pelme, Vladimir Keleshev, Floris Bruynooghe, Ronny Pfannschmidt and many others for discussions.

- allow boolean expression directly with skipif/xfail if a “reason” is also specified. Rework skipping documentation to recommend “condition as booleans” because it prevents surprises when importing markers between modules. Specifying conditions as strings will remain fully supported.

- reporting: color the last line red or green depending if failures/errors occurred or everything passed. thanks Christian Theunert.

- make “import pdb ; pdb.set_trace()” work natively wrt capturing (no “-s” needed anymore), making `pytest.set_trace()` a mere shortcut.

- fix issue181: –pdb now also works on collect errors (and on internal errors) . This was implemented by a slight internal refactoring and the introduction of a new hook `pytest_exception_interact` hook (see next item).

- fix issue341: introduce new experimental hook for IDEs/terminals to intercept debugging: `pytest_exception_interact(node, call, report)`.

- new monkeypatch.setattr() variant to provide a shorter invocation for patching out classes/functions from modules:

  > monkeypatch.setattr(“requests.get”, myfunc)

  will replace the “get” function of the “requests” module with `myfunc`.

- fix issue322: tearDownClass is not run if setUpClass failed. Thanks Mathieu Agopian for the initial fix. Also make all of pytest/nose finalizer mimick the same generic behaviour: if a setupX exists and fails, don’t run teardownX. This internally introduces a new method “node.addfinalizer()” helper which can only be called during the setup phase of a node.

- simplify pytest.mark.parametrize() signature: allow to pass a CSV-separated string to specify argnames. For example: `pytest.mark.parametrize("input,expected", [(1,2), (2,3)])` works as well as the previous: `pytest.mark.parametrize(("input", "expected"), ...)`.

- add support for setUpModule/tearDownModule detection, thanks Brian Okken.

- integrate tab-completion on options through use of “argcomplete”. Thanks Anthon van der Neut for the PR.

- change option names to be hyphen-separated long options but keep the old spelling backward compatible. py.test -h will only show the hyphenated version, for example “–collect-only” but “–collectonly” will remain valid as well (for backward-compat reasons). Many thanks to Anthon van der Neut for the implementation and to Hynek Schlawack for pushing us.

- fix issue 308 - allow to mark/xfail/skip individual parameter sets when parametrizing. Thanks Brianna Laugher.

- call new experimental pytest_load_initial_conftests hook to allow 3rd party plugins to do something before a conftest is loaded.

Bug fixes:

- fix issue358 - capturing options are now parsed more properly by using a new parser.parse_known_args method.
- pytest now uses argparse instead of optparse (thanks Anthon) which means that “argparse” is added as a dependency if installing into python2.6 environments or below.
- fix issue333: fix a case of bad unittest/pytest hook interaction.
- PR27: correctly handle nose.SkipTest during collection. Thanks Antonio Cuni, Ronny Pfannschmidt.
- fix issue355: junitxml puts name=”pytest” attribute to testsuite tag.
- fix issue336: autouse fixture in plugins should work again.
- fix issue279: improve object comparisons on assertion failure for standard datatypes and recognise collections.abc. Thanks to Brianna Laugher and Mathieu Agopian.
- fix issue317: assertion rewriter support for the is_package method
- fix issue335: document py.code.ExceptionInfo() object returned from pytest.raises(), thanks Mathieu Agopian.
- remove implicit distribute_setup support from setup.py.
- fix issue305: ignore any problems when writing pyc files.
- SO-17664702: call fixture finalizers even if the fixture function partially failed (finalizers would not always be called before)
- fix issue320 - fix class scope for fixtures when mixed with module-level functions. Thanks Anatloy Bubenkoff.
- you can specify “-q” or “-qq” to get different levels of “quieter” reporting (thanks Katarzyna Jachim)
- fix issue300 - Fix order of conftest loading when starting py.test in a subdirectory.
- fix issue323 - sorting of many module-scoped arg parametrizations
- make sessionfinish hooks execute with the same cwd-context as at session start (helps fix plugin behaviour which write output files with relative path such as pytest-cov)
- fix issue316 - properly reference collection hooks in docs
- fix issue 306 - cleanup of -k/-m options to only match markers/test names/keywords respectively. Thanks Wouter van Ackooy.
- improved doctest counting for doctests in python modules – files without any doctest items will not show up anymore and doctest examples are counted as separate test items. thanks Danilo Bellini.
- fix issue245 by depending on the released py-1.4.14 which fixes py.io.dupfile to work with files with no mode. Thanks Jason R. Coombs.
- fix junitxml generation when test output contains control characters, addressing issue267, thanks Jaap Broekhuizen
- fix issue338: honor –tb style for setup/teardown errors as well. Thanks Maho.
- fix issue307 - use yaml.safe_load in example, thanks Mark Eichin.
- better parametrize error messages, thanks Brianna Laugher
- pytest_terminal_summary(terminalreporter) hooks can now use ”.section(title)” and ”.line(msg)” methods to print extra information at the end of a test run.