how to access the unittest.main(verbosity) setting in a unittest.TestCase

Question

According to the documentation I can set the verbosity level of a python unittest when calling unittest.main, e.g.

unittest.main(verbosity=2) 

How can I access this information within a unittest.TestCase?

Answer 1

The problem with any method based on patching or subclassing unittest.TestProgram is that you have to get the patch in place before unittest.TestProgram is started. But that's not going to be possible if your test case is being run via discovery:

python -m unittest discover -v 

An approach that works in the discovery case is to use the inspect module to search up the stack until a method on unittest.TestProgram is found:

import inspect import unittest  def unittest_verbosity():     """Return the verbosity setting of the currently running unittest     program, or 0 if none is running.      """     frame = inspect.currentframe()     while frame:         self = frame.f_locals.get('self')         if isinstance(self, unittest.TestProgram):             return self.verbosity         frame = frame.f_back     return 0 

Answer 2

A way to achieve this is to subclass unittest.TestCase and unittest.main in a file. Here, you define a variable (e.g. globalverb) the can be used globally or as class or Singleton, and then you override unittest.main:

def main(*args, **kwargs):      # parse arguments etc to get the verbosity number or whatever     # ...     # set this number to the defined class     globalverb = verbose_number     return unittest.main(*args, **kwargs) 

Later, you subclass unittest.TestCase:

class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):     def my_special_function(self):         if globalverb ... 

With this approach it is possible to use the verbose,verbosity or any other number and information in a (derived) TestCase, from arguments passed on to a unittest.

Comments welcome.