Member-only story

Pytest Fixtures: Your Secret Weapon for Writing Powerful Tests

Tomas Svojanovsky
Dev Genius
Published in
6 min readApr 15, 2024

Fixtures bring more control to your tests. They can help with defining data sets, which are reset for each test. We can also specify the test scope; even if the fixture is called for each test, we can change to another scope like module.

They also allow easy use for setup and teardown logic. I think they are a must-have tool for every Python developer who wants to use pytest.

Install dependencies

pip install pytest

What is fixture?

In pytest, fixtures are functions that are executed before and after each test. We can use fixtures to prepare data and make it available to our test cases.

Setup and Teardown

If you’re familiar with other testing frameworks, you might be looking for setup and teardown functions. In pytest, fixtures handle this functionality. By default, each fixture provides fresh data to every test, ensuring that tests don’t interfere with each other’s data.

While pytest supports xUnit-style setup/teardown functions, the fixture approach is generally preferred for its modularity and flexibility.

To use a fixture, decorate your function with the @pytest.fixture decorator. Pytest will…

--

--

Published in Dev Genius

Coding, Tutorials, News, UX, UI and much more related to development

Written by Tomas Svojanovsky

I'm a full-stack developer. Programming isn't just my job but also my hobby. I like developing seamless user experiences and working on server-side complexities

Responses (5)

What are your thoughts?