Testing user interfaces is not always obvious. Here are a few tricks for testing prompt_toolkit applications.
PosixPipeInput and DummyOutput¶During the creation of a prompt_toolkit Application, we can specify what input and output device to be used. By default, these are output objects that correspond with sys.stdin and sys.stdout. In unit tests however, we want to replace these.
For the input, we want a “pipe input”. This is an input device, in which we can programmatically send some input. It can be created with create_pipe_input(), and that return either a PosixPipeInput or a Win32PipeInput depending on the platform.
For the output, we want a DummyOutput. This is an output device that doesn’t render anything. We don’t want to render anything to sys.stdout in the unit tests.
Note
Typically, we don’t want to test the bytes that are written to sys.stdout, because these can change any time when the rendering algorithm changes, and are not so meaningful anyway. Instead, we want to test the return value from the Application or test how data structures (like text buffers) change over time.
So we programmatically feed some input to the input pipe, have the key bindings process the input and then test what comes out of it.
In the following example we use a PromptSession, but the same works for any Application.
from prompt_toolkit.shortcuts import PromptSession
from prompt_toolkit.input import create_pipe_input
from prompt_toolkit.output import DummyOutput
def test_prompt_session():
with create_pipe_input() as inp:
inp.send_text("hello\n")
session = PromptSession(
input=inp,
output=DummyOutput(),
)
result = session.prompt()
assert result == "hello"
In the above example, don’t forget to send the \n character to accept the prompt, otherwise the Application will wait forever for some more input to receive.
AppSession¶
Sometimes it’s not convenient to pass input or output objects to the Application, and in some situations it’s not even possible at all. This happens when these parameters are not passed down the call stack, through all function calls.
An easy way to specify which input/output to use for all applications, is by creating an AppSession with this input/output and running all code in that AppSession. This way, we don’t need to inject it into every Application or print_formatted_text() call.
Here is an example where we use create_app_session():
from prompt_toolkit.application import create_app_session
from prompt_toolkit.shortcuts import print_formatted_text
from prompt_toolkit.output import DummyOutput
def test_something():
with create_app_session(output=DummyOutput()):
...
print_formatted_text('Hello world')
...
Pytest fixtures¶
In order to get rid of the boilerplate of creating the input, the DummyOutput, and the AppSession, we create a single fixture that does it for every test. Something like this:
import pytest
from prompt_toolkit.application import create_app_session
from prompt_toolkit.input import create_pipe_input
from prompt_toolkit.output import DummyOutput
@pytest.fixture(autouse=True, scope="function")
def mock_input():
with create_pipe_input() as pipe_input:
with create_app_session(input=pipe_input, output=DummyOutput()):
yield pipe_input
For compatibility with pytest’s capsys fixture, we have to create a new AppSession for every test. This can be done in an autouse fixture. Pytest replaces sys.stdout with a new object in every test that uses capsys and the following will ensure that the new AppSession will each time refer to the latest output.
from prompt_toolkit.application import create_app_session
@fixture(autouse=True, scope="function")
def _pt_app_session()
with create_app_session():
yield
Type checking¶
Prompt_toolkit 3.0 is fully type annotated. This means that if a prompt_toolkit application is typed too, it can be verified with mypy. This is complementary to unit tests, but also great for testing for correctness.
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