Cannot import conftest.py on Windows

Question

I'm quite new to pytest and creating packages (modules) in general. I had a few tests written in pytest which worked well until I refactored scripts structure. This was actually neccessary, because there was many scripts and it was quite chaotic for orientation. The current directory structure looks this way:

C:\Users\local\workspace
         .+---tools
             +---base
                 +---__init__.py
                 +---conftest.py
                 +---script1.py
                 +---script2.py
             +---misc
                 +---__init__.py
                 +---run.py
             +---__init__.py

script1.py and script2.py include some classes and special classes for testing. I was told that conftest.py should be located in the same folder as top-level test files, so I put it into base directory.

I run pytest from run.py by the following way:

pytest_args = workspace + "/tools/base/script1.py "
pytest_args += workspace + "/tools/base/script2.py"
pytest.main(pytest_args)

where workspace contains c:/Users/local/workspace. I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c:\Python27\Lib\_pytest\config.py", line 543, in importconftest
    mod = conftestpath.pyimport()
  File "c:\Python27\Lib\py\_path\local.py", line 660, in pyimport
     raise self.ImportMismatchError(modname, modfile, self)
 ImportMismatchError: ('tools.base.conftest', 'c:/Users/local/workspace\\jenkins\\tools\\base\\conftest.py', local('c:\\Users\\wokspace\\tools\\base\\conftest.py'))
 ERROR: could not load c:\Users\local\workspace\tools\base\conftest.py

I really don't know, how to fix this. Everything worked fine when all scripts were in the same folder (and without __init__.py). Other scripts work fine (I mean with depencies, where some script needs a module from other directory), just pytest fails on this.

Weird is that on Linux distributions, this works fine. I guess there is a problem with windows paths, which seems to be a real problem for pytest. Do you have any ideas how to solve this please?

Thank you

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem, and what eventually fixed it was deleting all my __pycache__ directories and .pyc files.