Skip to content

Testing

patera.testing.PateraTestClient runs the application (including startup and shutdown hooks) and sends requests through HTTPX. It needs the testing extra, which also installs pytest and pytest-asyncio:

uv add --dev "patera[testing]"

A first test

# tests/conftest.py
import pytest

from patera.testing import PateraTestClient
from app import App


@pytest.fixture
async def client():
    async with PateraTestClient(App()) as c:
        yield c

# tests/test_users.py
async def test_list_users(client):
    res = await client.get("/api/v1/users/")
    assert res.status_code == 200

The client offers get, post, put, patch, delete, head, options and request, which all accept the usual HTTPX keyword arguments such as json=, headers= and files=.

The async context manager runs the lifespan. A bare HTTPX ASGI transport does not run startup and shutdown hooks.

Configure pytest

# pyproject.toml
[tool.pytest.ini_options]
asyncio_mode = "auto"
asyncio_default_fixture_loop_scope = "function"

Run the tests

uv run patera test              # loads .env.test if present
uv run patera test -k login -q  # pytest options in any order
uv run patera test -- -x        # everything after -- goes to pytest unchanged
uv run pytest                   # plain pytest

patera test --env-file FILE loads another environment file, which must exist.

Good practice

  • Set test configuration and environment variables before constructing the app.
  • Use a fresh app and isolated databases, files and caches for independent tests.
  • Test production error behaviour with DEBUG disabled when asserting generic 500 bodies.
  • Cover input failures, authorization, transaction commit/rollback, response models and lifecycle cleanup.
  • Mock external SMTP, HTTP and AI transports instead of sending real requests.
  • Use a socket harness for WebSockets and isolated argv/output/filesystem for CLI commands.