Getting the results of a unittest programmatically

Question

I wrote some 'unittest' code, and it's great. I can see it on the CLI when I run it manually.

Now I want to hook it up to run automatically as part of a merge to master hook on my repository. I have everything set up with dummy code except for the part of grabbing the results of the unittest programmatically.

When I call unittest.main() to run them all, it throws a SystemExit. I've tried catching it and rerouting the standard output, but I wasn't able to get it to work, and it also feels like I'm doing it wrong. Is there an easier way to get the results of the unittests, like in a Python list of line strings, or even a more complicated result object?

Really for my purposes, I'm only interested in 100% pass or fail, and then showing that visual in the repository on a pull request to master, with a link to the full unittest result details.

I'm also not married to 'unittest' if some other Python unit test framework can be called and pass off results easily.

Answer 1

You can pass exit=False to unittest.main, and capture the return value. To run it from another script, or the interactive interpreter, you can specify a target module as well.

That gives us an instance of the TestCase or TestSuite class that was executed. The internal unittest machinery will make a TestResult object available in the result attribute of that object.

That object will have a TestResult.wasSuccessful method that gives the result you're looking for.

Assuming you have some file tests.py:

from unittest import main

test = main(module='tests', exit=False)
print(test.result.wasSuccessful())