unittest-parallel

unittest-parallel

unittest-parallel is a parallel unit test runner for Python with coverage support.

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Run Unit Tests in Parallel

To run unittest-parallel, specify the directory containing your unit tests with the -s argument and your package's top-level directory using the -t argument:

unittest-parallel -t . -s tests

By default, unittest-parallel runs unit test modules on all CPU cores available.

To run your unit tests with coverage, add either the --coverage option (for line coverage) or the --coverage-branch for line and branch coverage.

unittest-parallel -t . -s tests --coverage-branch

Parallelism Level

By default, unittest-parallel runs test modules in parallel, which works with test class and module fixtures. If you don't have any module fixtures, you can use the --level=class option to run test classes in parallel. If you don't have any module or class fixtures, you can use the --level=test option to run individual tests in parallel.

Do I Need unittest-parallel?

unittest-parallel helps the most when you have many long-running unit tests, such as those that make web service calls or are compute-intensive. If you just have many fast-running unit tests, unittest-parallel may slow down unit test execution due to the cost of parallelization.

For example, for one of my projects with thousands of compute-intensive unit tests, running tests with unittest-parallel is five times faster than running tests using Python's built-in unit test runner.

For another project, with hundreds of fast-running unit tests, running tests using unittest-parallel is twice as slow as running them using Python's built-in unit test runner.

To determine if unittest-parallel will improve your unit test run times, you'll need to try it on your project.

Development

This package is developed using python-build. It was started using python-template as follows:

template-specialize python-template/template/ unittest-parallel/ -k package unittest-parallel -k name 'Craig A. Hobbs' -k email '[e-mail]' -k github 'craigahobbs' -k noapi 1