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.

A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On Alliances from Smashing Frames
Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they p...

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 18, 2026

You Can Message Me From My Website Now

I came across a rather interesting idea (via Intial Charge): I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll...

via Chris Hannah April 18, 2026

Rhea Finance exploited for $18.4 million, some recovered

Rhea Finance's lending product was exploited for around $18.4 million after an attacker took advantage of a bug in the platform's slippage protection feature. The stolen assets affected both platform and user funds.Some of the stolen tokens were returned b...

via Web3 is Going Just Great April 18, 2026

Generated by openring