Today I'm excited to finally open-source some work I did with DataMade this past spring to make testing highly-stateful Flask-SQLAlchemy apps much easier. The result is pytest-flask-sqlalchemy, a plugin for the pytest test runner that allows a developer to wrap tests in a database transaction that gets rolled back after the test exits.
Here's the gist of it:
Some developers discourage touching the database in unit tests and advocate mocking database interactions instead, but when testing a highly-stateful web app like Dedupe.io, tests need to interact with a real database or else they won’t do a reasonable job of approximating the app’s core logic.
When tests run updates against a real database, however, they risk violating test isolation, the principle that tests should be fully independent from one another and should not share any state. Since it would be impractical to create a fresh database for every test, the tests share a connection to the database, meaning that the updates that a test introduces can leak from test to test if the developer isn’t careful. To write a unit test for Dedupe.io, the engineering team needed to make sure that they reversed not only the direct updates that the test made to the database, but that they reversed any side effects as well.
Taking inspiration from Django’s built-in support for transactional tests, the pytest-flask-sqlalchemy plugin provides comprehensive, easy-to-use pytest fixtures for ensuring test isolation in database transactions for Flask-SQLAlchemy apps. The plugin allows a developer to wrap any test in a database transaction, an isolated unit of database work that can be “rolled back” to reverse new changes.
Head on over to the DataMade blog
to catch the rest. If this is your stack, I'd love to hear your feedback! You can
get me on Twitter or on email at jean@this hostname.