Concepts

Fixtup concepts are described on this page. They can help you to better understand the advanced features.

fixture

A fixture represent an isolated environment mount from a fixture template. A fixture usually live the time of the test. It’s behavior can be tune by policies

fixture hook

hooks allow you to execute your own code when starting or stopping a fixture. There is a hook for each change of state in fixture livecycle. A hook is a python module inside of a fixture template. They are optional.

hook usecases :

Wait for the availability of a service before running a test
Populate a database with data before running a test
clean-up data from sqlite or postgres database
…

fixtup propose 6 hooks.

hook_mounted.py : executed when the fixture is mounted, i.e. the fixture’s template folder is copied

hook_started.py : executed when the fixture is started and every plugin has been runned, for example after docker-compose has run and after environment variables have been loaded

hook_setup_data.py : runs between each test to mount data required at the start of the test. This hook is executed every time, even if the fixture remains in the running state between each test.

hook_stopping.py : executed when the fixture stops

hook_teardown_data.py : runs at the end of each test to clean up the data mounted at the setup_data step.

hook_unmounting.py : executed before the folder containing the fixture is deleted

fixture livecycle

A fixture has a livecycle. Unmounted fixture does not have physical existence. When a fixture is mounted, a space is created on disk to hold fixture content and environment. When it’s started, the environment relative to the fixture is running. It may be containers, environments variable, …

fixture template

A fixture template is a definition of the environment to mount in a fixture. Fixtup takes the fixture template and instanciate a fixture from it.

plugin

A plugin adds functionality to fixtup. A plugin is invoked during transitions in the lifecycle. The fixtup plugins rely on a definition file present in the fixture template. For example, .env for fixtup.plugins.dotenv plugin or docker-compose.yml for fixtup.plugins.docker.

more about plugin