literalinclude with markers for showing code in documentation#

I wanted to include some example Python tests in the Datasette documentation - but since they were tests, I also wanted to execute them as part of my test suite to make sure they worked correctly.

I solved this with the Sphinx literalinclude directive.

Here’s what I put in my docs/testing_plugins.rst#L92-L111 file:

1
A simple test looks like this:
2

3
.. literalinclude:: ../tests/test_docs.py
4
   :language: python
5
   :start-after: # -- start test_homepage --
6
   :end-before: # -- end test_homepage --
7

8
Or for a JSON API:
9

10
.. literalinclude:: ../tests/test_docs.py
11
   :language: python
12
   :start-after: # -- start test_actor_is_null --
13
   :end-before: # -- end test_actor_is_null --
14

15
To make requests as an authenticated actor, create a signed ``ds_cookie`` using the ``datasette.client.actor_cookie()`` helper function and pass it in ``cookies=`` like this:
16

17
.. literalinclude:: ../tests/test_docs.py
18
   :language: python
19
   :start-after: # -- start test_signed_cookie_actor --
20
   :end-before: # -- end test_signed_cookie_actor --

Note that the paths like ../tests/test_docs.py are relative to the root docs/ folder, which is a sibling of tests/.

Then in tests/test_docs.py:

1
# fmt: off
2

3
# -- start test_homepage --
4
@pytest.mark.asyncio
5
async def test_homepage():
6
    ds = Datasette(memory=True)
7
    response = await ds.client.get("/")
8
    html = response.text
9
    assert "<h1>" in html
10
# -- end test_homepage --
11

12
# -- start test_actor_is_null --
13
@pytest.mark.asyncio
14
async def test_actor_is_null():
15
    ds = Datasette(memory=True)
16
    response = await ds.client.get("/-/actor.json")
17
    assert response.json() == {"actor": None}
18
# -- end test_actor_is_null --
19

20
# -- start test_signed_cookie_actor --
21
@pytest.mark.asyncio
22
async def test_signed_cookie_actor():
23
    ds = Datasette(memory=True)
24
    cookies = {"ds_actor": ds.client.actor_cookie({"id": "root"})}
25
    response = await ds.client.get("/-/actor.json", cookies=cookies)
26
    assert response.json() == {"actor": {"id": "root"}}
27
# -- end test_signed_cookie_actor --

The rendered documentation can be seen here.

The # fmt: off line at the start is an instruction to Black to ignore that section of the file. Without that, running Black would insist on adding newlines before the closing # -- end comments, which would show up as blank space in the documentation.

Newsletter

literalinclude with markers for showing code in documentation#