Running Flask Tests without installing the app

April 8, 2017 | ci | programming | python |

The Flask Docs have a great section for testing. However they assume that you have the app installed with pip install -e . which I almost never do. (Maybe I should start?) I have had trouble with this approach. So one little hack to inject your app into the searchable python path is to do something like this:

export BLOG_PATH=$(pwd) && python tests/blog_tests.py

We use \$(pwd) so that this will "just work" no matter which computer you run it on (i.e. test, dev, other persons dev) Then in yourtests/blog_tests.py file you import your flask app like this:

sys.path.insert(0, os.environ.get('BLOG_PATH'))
from blog.blog import app, init_db

You can see the full details here: https://circleci.com/gh/levlaz/blog My biggest issue with installing the app in a traditional sense is that when I run it with apache mod_wsgi it does not seem to actually copy over the right folders and apache is not able to find templates or static files. So that sucks, and I am probably doing something wrong. But this approach works more or less no matter what so sometimes a hack is better than derping around with no solution (as I did for six hours yesterday).

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
Make AI Boring Again from charity.wtf
The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

17 conversations in Jakarta, Indonesia: https://sive.rs/met/at-14

via Derek Sivers July 3, 2026

You’ll miss the soul when it’s gone

Pretty grim day of news in the industry today, with Salma Alam-Naylor stepping away from developer relations work permanently, Josh Comeau taking a sabbatical from making courses and GSAP’s once-vibrant forums descending into a ghost town. The reason your...

via Andy Bell July 3, 2026

Midnight Train to Stockholm

I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more i...

via matduggan.com July 3, 2026

Generated by openring

Lev Lazinskiy