Astropy Testing Tools#
This section is primarily a reference for developers that want to understand or add to the Astropy testing machinery. See /development/testguide for an overview of running or writing the tests.
Details#
The dependencies used by the Astropy test suite are provided by a separate
package called |pytest-astropy|. This package provides the pytest
dependency itself, in addition to several pytest plugins that are used by
Astropy, and will also be of general use to other packages.
Since the testing dependencies are not actually required to install or use
Astropy, in the pyproject.toml file they are not included under the
[project] section in dependencies. Instead, they are listed under the
[project.optional-dependences] in named sections such as test or dev_all.
In particular the test dependencies are the minimal set of dependencies for running
astropy tests and you would use this primarily to check that tests pass without the
optional dependencies. This is not common and would normally be done with tox -e
test.
astropy.tests.helper Module#
To ease development of tests that work with Astropy, the
astropy.tests.helper module provides some utility functions to make
tests that use Astropy conventions or classes easier to work with, e.g.,
functions to test for near-equality of ~astropy.units.Quantity objects.
The functionality here is not exhaustive, because much of the useful tools are either in the standard library, pytest, or numpy.testing. This module contains primarily functionality specific to the astropy core package or packages that follow the Astropy package template.
Conversion Guide#
Some long-standing functionality has been removed. The following table maps them to what you should use instead.
Removed |
Use this |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reference/API#
Astropy Test Runner#
Warning
astropy.test, TestRunner, and TestRunnerBase are deprecated as of v8.0.
This will also affect downstream packagename.test generated using TestRunner.
If you use any of the API referenced in this section, please consider
switching away to using pytest natively.
For example, running astropy.test() in Python is equivalent to
running pytest --pyargs astropy from the command line.
When executing tests with packagename.test the call to pytest is controlled
by the astropy.tests.runner.TestRunner class.
The ~astropy.tests.runner.TestRunner class is used to generate the
packagename.test function, the test function generates a set of command line
arguments to pytest. The arguments to pytest are defined in the
~astropy.tests.runner.TestRunner.run_tests method, the arguments to
run_tests and their respective logic are defined in methods of
~astropy.tests.runner.TestRunner decorated with the
astropy.tests.runner.keyword decorator. For an example of this see
~astropy.tests.runner.TestRunnerBase. This design makes it easy for
packages to add or remove keyword arguments to their test runners, or define a
whole new set of arguments by subclassing from
~astropy.tests.runner.TestRunnerBase.