Pytest is extensible and has plenty of plugins. You don’t need to use any of them, but you might find some very useful. I love this because you have an easy time to get started with unit testing, while still finding amazing stuff when you’re more experienced 🤩

In this article, I’ll show you examples of plugins I use and the plugins I found while writing this article. You might want to cover the basics of unit testing first or refresh testing details like fixtures.

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How can I add a plugin?

All plugins presented in this article can be installed via pip . Most of them are then already active. For example, when you install pytest-sugar via

pip install pytest-sugar

You can just execute pytest and the plugin will automatically work. Others need to be used more directly. For example, after installing pytest-timeout you need to specify the timeout parameter you want to use:

pytest --timeout=1

Don’t worry, I will explain those two plugins later 🙂

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How many Pytest plugins exist?

Searching on pypi.org for the trove classifier Framework :: Pytest , I found 668 packages. A stunning 1053 packages have “pytest” in the name. 461 packages have both, the name and the trove classifier.

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