pytest-base-url is a simple plugin for pytest that provides an optional base URL via the command line or configuration file.

You will need the following prerequisites in order to use pytest-base-url:

• Python 3.8+ or PyPy3

To install pytest-base-url:

$ pip install pytest-base-url

We welcome contributions.

To learn more, see Development

Rather than repeating or abstracting a base URL in your tests, pytest-base-url provides a base_url fixture that returns the specified base URL.

import urllib2

def test_example(base_url):
    assert 200 == urllib2.urlopen(base_url).getcode()

You can specify the base URL on the command line:

$ pytest --base-url http://www.example.com

You can specify the base URL using a configuration file:

[pytest]
base_url = http://www.example.com

You can specify the base URL by setting the PYTEST_BASE_URL environment variable.

If your test harness takes care of launching an instance of your application under test, you may not have a predictable base URL to provide on the command line. Fortunately, it's easy to override the base_url fixture and return the correct URL to your test.

In the following example a live_server fixture is used to start the application and live_server.url returns the base URL of the site.

import urllib2
import pytest

@pytest.fixture
def base_url(live_server):
    return live_server.url

def test_search(base_url):
    assert 200 == urllib2.urlopen('{0}/search'.format(base_url)).getcode()

It's relatively simple to create your own live_server fixture, however you may be able to take advantage of one of the following:

• Django applications can use pytest-django's live_server fixture.
• Flask applications can use pytest-flask's live_server fixture.

If you specify a base URL for a site that's unavailable then all tests using that base URL will likely fail. To avoid running every test in this instance, you can enable base URL verification. This will check the base URL is responding before proceeding with the test suite. To enable this, specify the --verify-base-url command line option or set the VERIFY_BASE_URL environment variable to TRUE.

You can skip tests based on the value of the base URL so long as it is provided either by the command line or in a configuration file:

import urllib2
import pytest

@pytest.mark.skipif(
    "'dev' in config.getoption('base_url')",
    reason='Search not available on dev')
def test_search(base_url):
    assert 200 == urllib2.urlopen('{0}/search'.format(base_url)).getcode()

Unfortunately if the URL is provided by a fixture, there is no way to know this value at test collection.

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