Where do your unit tests live? Does is vary, depending on project size? Do you like a flat structure, with test files living alongside everything else? Are you a nested folders person?
I’m curious the practice of others, because I still don’t feel like I’ve found a testing directory structure that satisfies me.
In an iPython terminal if I think of doing some, but I do want to implement something more formal soon.
My projects are usually laid out like this at work:
src/ — module_1/ — some_file.py test/ — module_1/ — some_file_test.py
Tests?
I just copy the Java dev structure for this.
Which is basically just a reflection of directories. Someone else mentioned it here.
For unit tests, I put them within a folder parallel to the source code. The directory in that folder matches the module hierarchy.
A flat structure can work for extremely small projects, but things start to go sideways as the code base grows.
Putting the test files alongside the source files makes it harder work with from a project management perspective:
pytest
has to check more files when doing discovery, which makes the tests take longer- It is significantly harder to configure
mypy
to a more lenient set of rules for test code. - It is harder to package/deploy only the runtime code
If the project is big enough to have integration tests, I prefer to have those in their own folder like the unit test folder. It is possible to mark tests into different categories, but putting them in a dedicated folder makes it is harder for people to forget to mark an integration test.
Side note, I hadn’t tried
mypy
until your reply mentioned it and made me curious. I love it, and have already integrated it into my editor and pipeline. Thanks!