Start a server in a subprocess during a pytest session#

I wanted to start an actual server process, run it for the duration of my pytest session and shut it down at the end.

Here’s the recipe I came up with. This fixture lives in conftest.py:

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import pytest
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import sqlite_utils
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import subprocess
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@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
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def ds_server(tmp_path_factory):
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    db_directory = tmp_path_factory.mktemp("dbs")
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    db_path = db_directory / "test.db"
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    db = sqlite_utils.Database(db_path)
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    insert_test_data(db)
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    ds_proc = subprocess.Popen(
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        [
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            "datasette",
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            str(db_path),
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            "-p",
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            "8041"
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        ],
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        stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
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        stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
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    )
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    # Give the server time to start
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    time.sleep(2)
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    # Check it started successfully
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    assert not ds_proc.poll(), ds_proc.stdout.read().decode("utf-8")
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    yield ds_proc
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    # Shut it down at the end of the pytest session
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    ds_proc.terminate()

A test looks like this:

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import httpx
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def test_server_starts(ds_server):
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    response = httpx.get("http://127.0.0.1:8041/")
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    assert response.status_code == 200

Alternative recipe for serving static files#

While adding tests to Datasette Lite I found myself needing to run a localhost server that served static files directly.

I completely forgot about this TIL, and instead took inspiration from pytest-simplehttpserver - coming up with this pattern:

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from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
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import pathlib
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import pytest
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import time
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from http.client import HTTPConnection
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root = pathlib.Path(__file__).parent.parent.absolute()
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@pytest.fixture(scope="module")
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def static_server():
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    process = Popen(
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        ["python", "-m", "http.server", "8123", "--directory", root], stdout=PIPE
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    )
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    retries = 5
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    while retries > 0:
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        conn = HTTPConnection("localhost:8123")
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        try:
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            conn.request("HEAD", "/")
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            response = conn.getresponse()
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            if response is not None:
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                yield process
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                break
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        except ConnectionRefusedError:
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            time.sleep(1)
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            retries -= 1
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    if not retries:
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        raise RuntimeError("Failed to start http server")
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    else:
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        process.terminate()
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        process.wait()

Again, including static_server as a fixture is enough to ensure requests to http://localhost:8123/ will be served by that temporary server.

I like how this version polls for a successful HEAD request (a trick inspired by pytest-simplehttpserver) rather than just sleeping.

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Start a server in a subprocess during a pytest session#

Alternative recipe for serving static files#

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