Python unittest passing arguments

Question

In Python, how would I pass an argument from the command line to a unittest function?

Here is the code so far… I know it's wrong.

class TestingClass(unittest.TestCase):      def testEmails(self):         assertEqual(email_from_argument, "[email protected]")   if __name__ == "__main__":     unittest.main(argv=[sys.argv[1]])     email_from_argument = sys.argv[1] 

Answer 1

So the doctors here that are saying "You say that hurts? Then don't do that!" are probably right. But if you really want to, here's one way of passing arguments to a unittest test:

import sys import unittest  class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):     USERNAME = "jemima"     PASSWORD = "password"      def test_logins_or_something(self):         print('username:', self.USERNAME)         print('password:', self.PASSWORD)   if __name__ == "__main__":     if len(sys.argv) > 1:         MyTest.USERNAME = sys.argv.pop()         MyTest.PASSWORD = sys.argv.pop()     unittest.main() 

That will let you run with:

python mytests.py myusername mypassword 

You need the argv.pops, so your command line parameters don't mess with unittest's own...

The other thing you might want to look into is using environment variables:

import os import unittest  class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):     USERNAME = "jemima"     PASSWORD = "password"      def test_logins_or_something(self):         print('username:', self.USERNAME)         print('password:', self.PASSWORD)  if __name__ == "__main__":     MyTest.USERNAME = os.environ.get('TEST_USERNAME', MyTest.USERNAME)     MyTest.PASSWORD = os.environ.get('TEST_PASSWORD', MyTest.PASSWORD)     unittest.main() 

That will let you run with:

TEST_USERNAME=ausername TEST_PASSWORD=apassword python mytests.py 

And it has the advantage that you're not messing with unittest's own argument parsing. The downside is it won't work quite like that on Windows...

Answer 2

Another method for those who really want to do this in spite of the correct remarks that you shouldn't:

import unittest  class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):      def __init__(self, testName, extraArg):         super(MyTest, self).__init__(testName)  # calling the super class init varies for different python versions.  This works for 2.7         self.myExtraArg = extraArg      def test_something(self):         print(self.myExtraArg)  # call your test suite = unittest.TestSuite() suite.addTest(MyTest('test_something', extraArg)) unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(suite)