Want to help improve pytest? Please contribute to or join our upcoming sprint in June 2016!

Installing and Using plugins

This section talks about installing and using third party plugins. For writing your own plugins, please refer to Writing plugins.

Installing a third party plugin can be easily done with pip:

pip install pytest-NAME
pip uninstall pytest-NAME

If a plugin is installed, pytest automatically finds and integrates it, there is no need to activate it.

Here is a little annotated list for some popular plugins:

To see a complete list of all plugins with their latest testing status against different py.test and Python versions, please visit plugincompat.

You may also discover more plugins through a pytest- pypi.python.org search.

Requiring/Loading plugins in a test module or conftest file

You can require plugins in a test module or a conftest file like this:

pytest_plugins = "myapp.testsupport.myplugin",

When the test module or conftest plugin is loaded the specified plugins will be loaded as well.

pytest_plugins = “myapp.testsupport.myplugin”

which will import the specified module as a pytest plugin.

Finding out which plugins are active

If you want to find out which plugins are active in your environment you can type:

py.test --trace-config

and will get an extended test header which shows activated plugins and their names. It will also print local plugins aka conftest.py files when they are loaded.

Deactivating / unregistering a plugin by name

You can prevent plugins from loading or unregister them:

py.test -p no:NAME

This means that any subsequent try to activate/load the named plugin will not work.

If you want to unconditionally disable a plugin for a project, you can add this option to your pytest.ini file:

[pytest]
addopts = -p no:NAME

Alternatively to disable it only in certain environments (for example in a CI server), you can set PYTEST_ADDOPTS environment variable to -p no:name.

See Finding out which plugins are active for how to obtain the name of a plugin.

Pytest default plugin reference

You can find the source code for the following plugins in the pytest repository.

_pytest.assertion support for presenting detailed information in failing assertions.
_pytest.cacheprovider merged implementation of the cache provider
_pytest.capture per-test stdout/stderr capturing mechanism.
_pytest.config command line options, ini-file and conftest.py processing.
_pytest.doctest discover and run doctests in modules and test files.
_pytest.genscript (deprecated) generate a single-file self-contained version of pytest
_pytest.helpconfig version info, help messages, tracing configuration.
_pytest.junitxml report test results in JUnit-XML format,
_pytest.mark generic mechanism for marking and selecting python functions.
_pytest.monkeypatch monkeypatching and mocking functionality.
_pytest.nose run test suites written for nose.
_pytest.pastebin submit failure or test session information to a pastebin service.
_pytest.pdb interactive debugging with PDB, the Python Debugger.
_pytest.pytester (disabled by default) support for testing pytest and pytest plugins.
_pytest.python Python test discovery, setup and run of test functions.
_pytest.recwarn recording warnings during test function execution.
_pytest.resultlog log machine-parseable test session result information in a plain
_pytest.runner basic collect and runtest protocol implementations
_pytest.main core implementation of testing process: init, session, runtest loop.
_pytest.skipping support for skip/xfail functions and markers.
_pytest.terminal terminal reporting of the full testing process.
_pytest.tmpdir support for providing temporary directories to test functions.
_pytest.unittest discovery and running of std-library “unittest” style tests.