OS X notifications for your pytest runs

pytest + OS X notifications = happy developers

pytest-osxnotify is a plugin for the pytest testing tool. It adds OS X notifications to your test runs so you know when a test run completes and whether it failed or succeeded without looking at your terminal window.

This is especially useful when you re-run your tests automatically every time a source file was modified.

A quick example

Installing pytest-osxnotify is easy. Let’s set up a simple example that shows you how to use pytest so that it watches your source files for modifications and re-runs the tests as necessary.

We start by installing pytest, pytest-xdist and pytest-osxnotify¹.

$ pip install pytest pytest-xdist pytest-osxnotify

Let’s also create a simple test file for us to run. Save the following as example_test.py in the current folder.

def test_example1():
    assert True

def test_example2():
    assert True

def test_example3():
    assert True

Now we start the pytest watcher that monitors our source file for modifications and re-runs the tests when necessary.

$ py.test -f example_test.py

That’s it. We can now move our terminal to the background and hack away in our favourite editor knowing that we’ll stay informed about the results of our test runs.