How do I correctly setup and teardown for my pytest class with tests?

Question

I am using selenium for end to end testing and I can't get how to use setup_class and teardown_class methods.

I need to set up browser in setup_class method, then perform a bunch of tests defined as class methods and finally quit browser in teardown_class method.

But logically it seems like a bad solution, because in fact my tests will not work with class, but with object. I pass self param inside every test method, so I can access objects' vars:

class TestClass:
  
    def setup_class(cls):
        pass
        
    def test_buttons(self, data):
        # self.$attribute can be used, but not cls.$attribute?  
        pass
        
    def test_buttons2(self, data):
        # self.$attribute can be used, but not cls.$attribute?
        pass
        
    def teardown_class(cls):
        pass
    

And it even seems not to be correct to create browser instance for class.. It should be created for every object separately, right?

So, I need to use __init__ and __del__ methods instead of setup_class and teardown_class?

Answer 1

According to Fixture finalization / executing teardown code, the current best practice for setup and teardown is to use yield instead of return:

import pytest

@pytest.fixture()
def resource():
    print("setup")
    yield "resource"
    print("teardown")

class TestResource:
    def test_that_depends_on_resource(self, resource):
        print("testing {}".format(resource))

Running it results in

$ py.test --capture=no pytest_yield.py
=== test session starts ===
platform darwin -- Python 2.7.10, pytest-3.0.2, py-1.4.31, pluggy-0.3.1
collected 1 items

pytest_yield.py setup
testing resource
.teardown


=== 1 passed in 0.01 seconds ===

Another way to write teardown code is by accepting a request-context object into your fixture function and calling its request.addfinalizer method with a function that performs the teardown one or multiple times:

import pytest

@pytest.fixture()
def resource(request):
    print("setup")

    def teardown():
        print("teardown")
    request.addfinalizer(teardown)
    
    return "resource"

class TestResource:
    def test_that_depends_on_resource(self, resource):
        print("testing {}".format(resource))