pytest-timeout 1.4.1

thread

This is the surest and most portable method. It is also the default on systems not supporting the signal method. For each test item the pytest-timeout plugin starts a timer thread which will terminate the whole process after the specified timeout. When a test item finishes this timer thread is cancelled and the test run continues.

The downsides of this method are that there is a relatively large overhead for running each test and that test runs are not completed. This means that other pytest features, like e.g. JUnit XML output or fixture teardown, will not function normally. The second issue might be alleviated by using the --boxed option of the pytest-xdist plugin.

The benefit of this method is that it will always work. Furthermore it will still provide you debugging information by printing the stacks of all the threads in the application to stderr.

signal

If the system supports the SIGALRM signal the signal method will be used by default. This method schedules an alarm when the test item starts and cancels it when it finishes. If the alarm expires during the test the signal handler will dump the stack of any other threads running to stderr and use pytest.fail() to interrupt the test.

The benefit of this method is that the pytest process is not terminated and the test run can complete normally.

The main issue to look out for with this method is that it may interfere with the code under test. If the code under test uses SIGALRM itself things will go wrong and you will have to choose the thread method.

Specifying the Timeout Method

The timeout method can be specified by using the timeout_method option in the pytest configuration file, the --timeout_method command line parameter or the timeout marker. Simply set their value to the string thread or signal to override the default method. On a marker this is done using the method keyword:

@pytest.mark.timeout(method='thread')
def test_foo():
    pass

1.4.1

• Fix coverage compatibility which was broken by 1.4.0.

1.4.0

• Better detection of when we are debugging, thanks Mattwmaster58.

1.3.4

• Give the threads a name to help debugging, thanks Thomas Grainger.

• Changed location to https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest-timeout because bitbucket is dropping mercurial support. Thanks Thomas Grainger and Bruno Oliveira.

1.3.3

• Fix support for pytest >= 3.10.

1.3.2

• This changelog was ommitted for the 1.3.2 release and was added afterwards. Apologies for the confusion.

• Fix pytest 3.7.3 compatibility. The capture API had changed slightly and this needed fixing. Thanks Bruno Oliveira for the contribution.

1.3.1

• Fix deprecation warning on Python 3.6. Thanks Mickaël Schoentgen

• Create a valid tag for the release. Somehow this didn’t happen for 1.3.0, that tag points to a non-existing commit.

1.3.0

• Make it possible to only run the timeout timer on the test function and not the whole fixture setup + test + teardown duration. Thanks Pedro Algarvio for the work!

• Use the new pytest marker API, Thanks Pedro Algarvio for the work!

1.2.1

• Fix for pytest 3.3, thanks Bruno Oliveira.

• Update supported python versions: - Add CPython 3.6. - Drop CPyhon 2.6 (as did pytest 3.3) - Drop CPyhon 3.3 - Drop CPyhon 3.4

1.2.0

• Allow using floats as timeout instead of only integers, thanks Tom Myers.

1.1.0

• Report (default) timeout duration in header, thanks Holger Krekel.

1.0.0

• Bump version to 1.0 to commit to semantic versioning.

• Fix issue #12: Now compatible with pytest 2.8, thanks Holger Krekel.

• No longer test with pexpect on py26 as it is no longer supported

• Require pytest 2.8 and use new hookimpl decorator

0.5

• Timeouts will no longer be triggered when inside an interactive pdb session started by pytest.set_trace() / pdb.set_trace().

• Add pypy3 environment to tox.ini.

• Transfer repository to pytest-dev team account.

0.4

• Support timeouts happening in (session scoped) finalizers.

• Change command line option –timeout_method into –timeout-method for consistency with pytest

0.3

• Added the PYTEST_TIMEOUT environment variable as a way of specifying the timeout (closes issue #2).

• More flexible marker argument parsing: you can now specify the method using a positional argument.

• The plugin is now enabled by default. There is no longer a need to specify timeout=0 in the configuration file or on the command line simply so that a marker would work.

0.2

• Add a marker to modify the timeout delay using a @pytest.timeout(N) syntax, thanks to Laurant Brack for the initial code.

• Allow the timeout marker to select the timeout method using the method keyword argument.

• Rename the –nosigalrm option to –method=thread to future proof support for eventlet and gevent. Thanks to Ronny Pfannschmidt for the hint.

• Add timeout and timeout_method items to the configuration file so you can enable and configure the plugin using the ini file. Thanks to Holger Krekel and Ronny Pfannschmidt for the hints.

• Tested (and fixed) for python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2.