What is a good approach for unit testing?

[mmartinortiz]

Hi,

I started recently to use PyInfra. So far I just use it for small things, provisioning some toy remote servers. If I want to feel confident with bigger changes, I prefer to have some tests in place.

My idea is to use pytest for testing that "things work as expected". For example, if I write a function that populates a Caddyfile and writes entries to work as a reverse proxy, how could I test that the file is correctly generated?. I can imagine that every operation has its peculiarities.

Cheers,
Manuel

[LiudengZhang]

For something like a Caddyfile, I'd recommend separating the config-generation logic into plain Python functions and testing those directly with pytest — keeps pyinfra out of the test entirely.

For smoke-testing that the full deploy runs without errors, pyinfra has a --dry flag that skips execution: pyinfra --dry @local deploy.py. The @local connector runs against your own machine so you don't need SSH set up.

For full end-to-end, you can spin up a throwaway Docker container and run pyinfra against it with @docker/<container_id>, then check the result with pytest-testinfra.

[mmartinortiz]

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for giving a different perspective, I'll sketch something.