Usage

There are several approaches to implementing tests using pyfakefs.

Automatically find and patch using fake_filesystem_unittest

The first approach is to allow pyfakefs to automatically find all real file functions and modules, and stub these out with the fake file system functions and modules. This is the simplest approach if you are using separate unit tests. The usage is explained in the pyfakefs wiki page Automatically find and patch file functions and modules and demonstrated in files example.py and example_test.py.

Patch using the PyTest plugin

If you use PyTest, you will be interested in the PyTest plugin in pyfakefs. This automatically patches all file system functions and modules in a manner similar to the automatic find and patch approach described above.

The PyTest plugin provides the fs fixture for use in your test. For example:

def my_fakefs_test(fs):
    # "fs" is the reference to the fake file system
    fs.CreateFile('/var/data/xx1.txt')
    assert os.path.exists('/var/data/xx1.txt')

Patch using fake_filesystem_unittest.Patcher

If you are using other means of testing like nose, you can do the patching using fake_filesystem_unittest.Patcher - the class doing the actual work of replacing the filesystem modules with the fake modules in the first two approaches.

The easiest way is to just use Patcher as a context manager:

from fake_filesystem_unittest import Patcher

with Patcher() as patcher:
    # access the fake_filesystem object via patcher.fs
    patcher.fs.CreateFile('/foo/bar', contents='test')

    # the following code works on the fake filesystem
    with open('/foo/bar') as f:
        contents = f.read()

You can also initialize Patcher manually:

from fake_filesystem_unittest import Patcher

patcher = Patcher()
patcher.setUp()     # called in the initialization code
...
patcher.tearDown()  # somewhere in the cleanup code

Patch using unittest.mock (deprecated)

You can also use mock.patch() to patch the modules manually. This approach will only work for the directly imported modules, therefore it is not suited for testing larger code bases. As the other approaches are more convenient, this one is considered deprecated. You have to create a fake filesystem object, and afterwards fake modules based on this file system for the modules you want to patch.

The following modules and functions can be patched:

• os and os.path by fake_filesystem.FakeOsModule
• io by fake_filesystem.FakeIoModule
• pathlib by fake_pathlib.FakePathlibModule
• build-in open() by fake_filesystem.FakeFileOpen

import pyfakefs.fake_filesystem as fake_fs

# Create a faked file system
fs = fake_fs.FakeFilesystem()

# Do some setup on the faked file system
fs.CreateFile('/foo/bar', contents='test')

# Replace some built-in file system related modules you use with faked ones

# Assuming you are using the mock library to ... mock things
try:
    from unittest.mock import patch  # In Python 3, mock is built-in
except ImportError:
    from mock import patch  # Python 2

# Note that this fake module is based on the fake fs you just created
os = fake_fs.FakeOsModule(fs)
with patch('mymodule.os', os):
    fd = os.open('/foo/bar', os.O_RDONLY)
    contents = os.read(fd, 4)