testresources 0.2

At EuroPython this year, I talked about unittest and how it’s misunderstood little module with it’s own problems, and that despite its rough exterior it really is a Good Thing.

To demonstrate this, I gave examples of three pieces of software that each extended unittest to solve the same problem: sharing expensive resources between tests.

The first two examples were Twisted’s setUpClass / tearDownClass and Zope’s layers. They are terrible and you should never use them.

If you really want to share expensive resources between tests, you should use testresources. testresources makes it easy to write tests that use resources that cost a lot to set up and tear down (such as databases or SSH servers) without screwing up your test isolation. Robert Collins, the author, cut the 0.2 release today.

testresources now has exactly one known bug, although Rob argues that maybe it’s one unknown bug. It’s down to the quantum level here: that’s how good testresources is.