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Hypothesis’s patch Fixture

In The Problem with Mocks we discussed some of the potential problems with mock-based tests. In this post we’ll discuss one of the most useful, and least problematic, ways that mock is used in the Hypothesis tests - patch().

patch

One of the best uses for mocks in the Hypothesis tests is through the patch fixture.

patch is a custom pytest fixture that integrates mock.patch (a feature of the mock library that we haven’t discussed) with pytest fixtures. You’ll see patch used very often in the Hypothesis tests.

patch is most often used when one of our modules imports and uses another one of our own modules. patch replaces the other module with a MagicMock object.

For example, h/views/api.py::create() is the view function that’s called when someone POSTs a new annotation to the https://hypothes.is/api/annotations URL. It calls the storage module to save the new annotation to the database. storage has its own tests and we don’t want our test for create() to be accessing the real database, so we want storage to be replaced with a mock object. This is done using a simple patch-based fixture:

class TestCreate(object):

    def test_it_creates_the_annotation_in_storage(self, storage):
        ... # (Call the create() view to create an annotation)

        # Use the mock storage object to test that it would have saved the
        # annotation to storage.
        storage.create_annotation.assert_called_once_with(...)

    @pytest.fixture
    def storage(self, patch):
        # Replace h.views.api.storage with a mock object, and return the
        # mock object.
        return patch('h.views.api.storage')

The code under test, h/views/api.py, imports another module h/storage.py like this:

from h import storage

In the tests above, the storage() fixture calls patch('h.views.api.storage') which replaces the storage module in h/views/api.py with a mock object. Since test_something_about_search() uses the storage() fixture, any views.py code that this test calls will see a mock object in place of the real storage module.

The storage() fixture happens to have the same name as the storage module it replaces - this isn’t necessary, the storage() fixture could be called anything and still replace the storage module - but giving patch fixtures the same name as the thing they patch is a convention in the Hypothesis tests.

patch is an unusual fixture in that it’s almost always used by other fixtures, like the storage fixture above, rather than by tests directly.

patch automatically takes care to do the mocking in the best way possible:

  • It uses autospec so that, just like when creating a MagicMock with create_autospec(), only those attributes that exist on the real object can be accessed or set on the mock (recursively). Call signatures are also matched: if code passes the wrong number of arguments, or a keyword argument that doesn’t exist on the real method, to a mock object from the patch fixture it’ll get a TypeError just as you would get from the real object.

  • patch also takes care of stopping the patch after the test method finishes, before the next test is run, so that one test’s mock object doesn’t leak into other tests.

It still isn’t perfect (see The Problem with Mocks for the limitations of autospeccing) but patch is one of the most useful and least problematic applications of the mock library and you’ll see it used a lot in the Hypothesis tests.

In the next post we’ll look at a pytest feature that’s often used in combination with patch - the usefixtures decorator.

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