Custom faker provider for usage with factory boy and pytest

Question

I am attempting to add some custom faker provider to use with factory_boy and pytest.

I put the provider in faker_providers/foo.py/Provider.

In my factories.py file, I have to import foo.py and then register by running:

factory.Faker.add_provider(foo.Provider)

I am thinking of using pytest_sessionstart(session) to auto-register all the custom provider under faker_providers. Is there a way to do that?

Any suggestions for other ways to organize and register custom providers would also be appreciated.

Aggi

Answer 1

Instead of instantiating a Faker to import from conftest, as of 2022, you can do the following inside your conftest file:

from factory import Faker

Faker.add_provider(CustomProvider)

And now you can just import from factory import Faker wherever you go. This works because the Faker class has a class attribute of type dictionary that saves your new providers.

The reason I put it in conftest is because this is where code is run initially for all pytest. You can also put this in a pytest plugin setup method as well, but I found this the easiest.

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The other way of doing this that I implemented was to have a utils folder with all my custom providers. Then, in a providers.py, I would add all my providers:

from factory import Faker

from .custom_provider import CustomProvider

for provider in (CustomProvider,):
    Faker.add_provider(provider)

Then in conftest.py, I would simply import this file:

import path.to.provider  # noqa

This way, I don't clutter my conftest too much.

Labbe

Answer 2

It seems like a design choice and only you know the best answer to it.

However, I would recommend instantiating faker = Faker() once for all tests after that adding all providers in a configuration file. And import faker from that place to everywhere it's needed.

It seems like conftest.py is a good choice for that.

Costate