An overview of assorted plugins

Now, we will take a look at some useful and/or interesting plugins. Of course, it is not possible to cover all plugins here, so we will try to cover the ones that cover popular frameworks and general capabilities, with a few obscure plugins thrown in. Of course, this barely scratches the surface, but let's get to it.

pytest-xdist

This is a very popular plugin and is maintained by the core developers; it allows you to run tests under multiple CPUs, to speed up the test run.

After installing it, simply use the -n command-line flag to use the given number of CPUs to run the tests:

λ pytest -n 4

And that's it! Now, your tests will run across four cores and hopefully speed up the test suite quite a bit, if it is CPU intensive, thought I/O-bound tests won't see much improvement, though. You can also use -n auto to let pytest-xdist automatically figure out the number of CPUs you have available.

Note

Keep in mind that when your tests are running concurrently, and in random...