Splitting a conftest.py file into several smaller conftest-like parts

Question

I've got a large conftest.py file that I wish to split into smaller parts, for two reasons:

1. The file is very large (~1000 lines, including documentation)
2. Some of the fixtures depend on other fixtures, and I have no reason to expose those other fixtures as part of the conftest "API" when users look for relevant fixtures

I am not aware of any mechanism provided by pytest to resolve conftest files in multiple locations within the same folder, so I contrived one, below:

import sys
import os


sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(__file__))


from _conftest_private_part_1 import *
from _conftest_private_part_2 import *
from _conftest_private_part_3 import *


@pytest.fixture
def a_fixture_that_is_part_of_the_public_conftest_api():
    pass

This works for my needs, but I do wonder if there is a better way.

Answer 1

You can put your stuff in other modules and reference them using a pytest_plugins variable in your conftest.py:

pytest_plugins = ['module1', 'module2'] 

This will also work if your conftest.py has hooks on them.

Answer 2

You shouldn't need any fancy magic for that. py.test automatically adds the path of the current test file to sys.path, as well as all parent paths up to the directory it was targeted at.

Because of that, you don't even need to put that shared code into a conftest.py. You can just put into plain modules or packages and then import it (if you want to share fixtures, those have to be in a conftest.py).

Also, there is this note about importing from conftest.py in the documentation:

If you have conftest.py files which do not reside in a python package directory (i.e. one containing an __init__.py) then “import conftest” can be ambiguous because there might be other conftest.py files as well on your PYTHONPATH or sys.path. It is thus good practise for projects to either put conftest.py under a package scope or to never import anything from a conftest.py file.