Tracebacks

Pytest excels at helping you with test failures. After running your tests via py.test, you will see an error report with a detailed traceback for each of the failures, if any. You can change the mode in which output is presented to you via the --tb cli option:

py.test --tb=auto    # (default) 'long' tracebacks for the first and last
                     # entry, but 'short' style for the other entries
py.test --tb=long    # exhaustive, informative traceback formatting
py.test --tb=short   # shorter traceback format
py.test --tb=line    # only one line per failure
py.test --tb=native  # Python standard library formatting
py.test --tb=no      # no traceback at all

Debugger

Have you ever heard of pdb - the Python Debugger? I strongly recommend checking it out, if you haven't used it yet. The standard library's built-in debugger will prove useful for debugging your Python code without installing any external dependencies or setting up some fancy IDE.

If invoked with the --pdb option, pytest will place a debugger breakpoint whenever an error occurs in your tests.

$ py.test --pdb

You can also set a debugger breakpoint yourself with import pdb; pdb.set_trace().

Use commands help, list and pp to inspect the test code.

If you want to get a list of all local variables and their value, it's best to run pytest with the -l option enabled, as locals() may contain internal pytest items if you print it from the breakpoint.

Running Broken Tests Only

An underrated feature of pytest is the --lf option, which tells pytest to only run the tests that failed the last time it was executed.

Once you've encountered any errors in your tests, you want to focus on the failures and get a better understanding of what's causing the problems as opposed to spending time on running tests that are perfectly fine.

Re-order Tests. Failures First

Keep in mind though, whenever you modify your code other tests may break.

If you run $ py.test --ff all tests will be executed, but re-ordered based on whether they've failed in the previous run or not. Failures first, successful tests after.

Stop Tests After N Failures

You can end the test session early by pressing CTRL-C. Although pytest catches the KeyboardInterrupt error and runs the teardown code before closing the session gracefully, it is definitely not the best way to stop the test suite.

Instead use -x to stop after the first failure, or --maxfail=N to stop after the first N failures.