Pytest and Selenium

How to Develop a UI test Sweet

What is Pytest

Pytest is a Python testing framework that originated from the PyPy project. It can be used to write various types of software tests, including unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and functional tests. Its features include parametrized testing, fixtures, and assert re-writing. It is often used with the Functional Programming Pattern but can be used in OOP tests. Pytest is Simple to use and easy to understand. Just create a function and pass its parameters and simply assert that a function returns the expected result.

What is Selenium

Selenium is an open-source umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries aimed at supporting browser automation. It provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests across most modern web browsers, without the need to learn a test scripting language. Selenium has Python, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby bindings. Selenium can be used for automating and testing any browser-based task.

Functional or OOP

Selenium and Pytest both work very well in Functional and OOP styles of programming, although I think Functional is fair easier for Pytest, but do you need to create and call a Utility Function for pure functional programming to work with selenium, this is unnecessary for OOP test classes, you just call the selenium constructor in the Class constructor. But for ease of use, I recommend Functional Tests and if you require OOP for your business requirements, I recommend the Singleton Pattern for your test sweet.

How to Setup Function Testing

We first need to install Pytest and Python Selenium Bindings. To do this run the following commands.

pip install pytest
pip install selenium

Then we need to download the Selenium driver, on windows just got to the site and put the binary in the same directory as the project, on Linux and MacOS you can use a package manager. I am running an Arch base Distro So I will run

sudo yay -S chromedriver

If you are on MacOS or Any other Linux Distro I recommend Nix package manager, Nix is a very nice package manager that has almost everything.

nix-shell -p chromedriver

Now that we have the chromedriver we can start writing the test, of course, we need to import Pytest and Selenium

import pytest
import selenium

Now we need to create a test setup function

def test_setup():
    global driver 
    driver_path = "/path/to/chromedriver"
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(driver_path)
    #Wait for Page to Load
    driver.implicitly_wait(10)
    # get a website, so demo
    driver.get(https://initpro.dev/)

Now let’s find the contact form and send an Email

def email_form_test():
    driver.find_element_by_id("name")
    driver.find_element_by_id("email")
    driver.find_element_by_id("message")

We can also test other things like the website’s title

def title_test():
    x = driver.title
    assert x == "iniPro - initPro"

You can test almost anything on the website, such as Modals, Forms, and Menus. After all tests have passed you need to “tare down” the webdriver. To do this I recommend just having a function at the end call

def test_teardown():
    driver.close()
    driver.quit()
    print("Test Complete")

Here is the Full Code

import pytest
import selenium

def test_setup():
    global driver 
    driver_path = "/path/to/chromedriver"
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(driver_path)
    driver.implicitly_wait(10)
    driver.get(https://initpro.dev/)

def email_form_test():
    driver.find_element_by_id("name")
    driver.find_element_by_id("email")
    driver.find_element_by_id("message")

def title_test():
    x = driver.title
    assert x == "iniPro - initPro"

def test_teardown():
    driver.close()
    driver.quit()
    print("Test Complete")