Efficiently Managing Context for Pytest Doctests

[nh916]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on a project that makes extensive use of pytest for testing. Within my project, I have numerous doctests embedded within the docstrings of pretty much every methods. However, all of these doctests require a certain context to be established beforehand, namely, an active instance of our custom API.

Currently, I have been including a context manager within every single doctest example to ensure the necessary API instance is available. Here’s a simplified example to illustrate the setup:

class SomeClass:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        """
        Examples
        --------
        ```python
        >>> with API(host=None, api_token=None) as api:
        ...     some_instance = SomeClass(name="example")
        ```
        """

However, this makes the doctests quite verbose, harder to maintain, and somewhat obscures the actual examples I'm trying to provide. I am looking for a way to establish this context for all doctests within a module or class globally, so that I don't have to repeat the context manager setup in every single doctest.

Is there an existing solution or best practice to manage the context for pytest doctests more efficiently? Or perhaps a way to establish a module-level or class-level setup that applies to all doctests within that scope?

[nh916]

actually I think I figured this out by putting conftest.py in the project root directory and putting this function in it

@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def inject_doctest_namespace(doctest_namespace, myt_api):
    doctest_namespace["api"] = my_api