pytest workflow?

[Jason Porath 0]

Hi all - 

I'm developing some in-house ftrack convenience scripts, to help empower junior devs to work faster, and I would like to get a testing suite for them going with pytest. Has anyone done anything similar?

I'm fairly new to pytest, and while I believe I understand the fundamentals, I'm a bit unsure as to how to best set up an ftrack fixture as a data source. The thoughts that have occurred:

• Connect to a pared-down "mock" ftrack database that can live easily on disk, like a sqlite database <-- my ideal solution
• Connect to a test ftrack server and, in the fixture code, manually set up all the ftrack data before I run the test, each time <-- seems like a ton of work, bound to miss edge cases
• Connect to a test ftrack server and somehow prevent the session from doing any commits <-- seems dangerous, unsure of feasibility

Does anyone have any insight on this?

[Steve Petterborg 4]

Hi Jason, welcome to the forum (from one former DWA-er to another). I hope to hear some solutions from folks in the trenches, but I can give an overview of what I know.

Internally we use a couple things for testing--automated tests with pytest use a combination of mocking (the API's all JSON blobs back and forth, so it's pretty easy to mock things like reading server information, object schemas, etc.) and a disposable ftrack installation in a container. I'm not involved in the build process of that one, so can't really say how much info we have in the db when we spin up the container. The other less-formal testing approach is with a heavier container we use for product demos as well--it has a number of real-world datasets and associated media, so it takes a while to pull. We use Docker and Kubernetes internally, but at least one customer has adopted a similar approach to standing up a temporary server using Vagrant, I believe. For populating local test and hacking instances, I use a combination of Python for setting up Projects and populating some data, and straight SQL for some of the settings that are tedious/impossible to set otherwise.

[Jason Porath 0]

Cool, thank you for the info! Right now I'm just mocking up some json data, but very interested in trying out disposable ftrack instances. Thanks for the insight!