Pytest executed in PyCharm or IntelliJ and executed on command-line resolve in different directories

[MaximM95]

Bug when executing pytest via Terminal.

Hello together, I have the following issue:
I am running pytest in PyCharm. It runs Python tests in tests. In my testcode I have a test sql file which I need to open and to execute during the test run. I am using the method str(Path("path/to/sql").resolve()) to get the absolute path. When this method gets executed in tests in PyCharm it returns than the correct absolute path: "~/project_dir/tests/path/to/sql". So via PyCharm or IntelliJ UI the tests are working fine.

But now I have a problem when I try to execute pytest via terminal: pytest ./tests --cov=./src --cov-branch. The test case fails since I get a FileNotFoundError. The absolute path which I get back from the method above is than "~/project_dir/path/to/sql". It resolves it to the project_dir and not to tests. Why does this happen and what should I need to adjust in order to fix it?

I know that one option is to add the absolute path in my device instead of resolving it, but I will also execute test than in a ci-cd pipeline, where the tests are execute in a container. There I will have a complete different folder structure. I want to have it generic in that way. I also could now do a workaround where I can check what is the working_directory if it is tests than str(Path("path/to/sql").resolve()) is enough, else go with str(Path("tests/path/to/sql").resolve()). Than it would also work. But I assume that there should be a way to fix it via command-line and I want it to fix it there to avoid doing these kind of workarounds.

The problem is that the working_directory in terminal is the project folder and in PyCharm it is set to /tests. But there is no possible way to set the working directory in pytest command line. Also when I specify --rootdir=./tests this does not work.

More info about my project: it is pretty simple structured:
my_project

• .github
• src
• tests
• .gitignore

Kind regards,
Maxim

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Resolving a path is cwd relative
Resolve relative to a file to protect from cwd variance

[MaximM95]

Thank you! That would be the solution. In that way the tests will not depend on the cwd and will pass.

But I thought it should be possible to specify a cwd when the pytest command is executed.

[The-Compiler]

Converting this to a discussion, as this has nothing to do with pytest itself really.