After being bored for a long time for the lack of a better infrastructure for creating test doubles in Python, I decided to give it a go.
I’m actually quite happy with what came out.. it took me about four weekends (was developed as a personal project), and I’ll dare to say that it’s the best mocking system for Python at the present time. Not only that, but it has features that I’ve not seen in any other mocking/stubing infrastructure, independent of language.
Here’s a feature list to catch your attention:
- Graceful platform for test doubles in Python (mocks, stubs, fakes, and dummies).
- Inspiration from real needs, and also from pmock, jmock, pymock, easymock, etc.
- Expectation of expressions defined by actually using mock objects.
- Expressions may be replayed in any order by default,
- Trivial specification of ordering between expressions when wanted.
- Nice parameter matching for defining expectations on method calls.
- Good error messages when expectations are broken.
- Mocking of many kinds of expressions (getting/setting/deleting attributes, calling, iteration, containment, etc)
- Graceful handling of nested expressions (e.g. ”person.details.get_phone().get_prefix()”)
- Mock ”proxies”, which allow passing through to the real object on specified expressions (e.g. useful with ”os.path.isfile()”).
- Mocking via temporary ”patching” of existent classes and instances.
- Trivial mocking of any external module (e.g. ”time.time()”) via ”proxy replacement”.
- Mock objects may have method calls checked for conformance with real class/instance to prevent API divergence.
- Type simulation for using mocks while still performing certain type-checking operations.
- Nice (optional) integration with ”unittest.TestCase”, including additional assertions (e.g. ”assertIs”, ”assertIn”, etc).
- More …
Worked? Check it out!