How do I disable a test using pytest?

Pytest has the skip and skipif decorators, similar to the Python unittest module (which uses skip and skipIf), which can be found in the documentation here.

Examples from the link can be found here:

@pytest.mark.skip(reason="no way of currently testing this")
def test_the_unknown():
    ...

import sys
@pytest.mark.skipif(sys.version_info < (3,3),
                    reason="requires python3.3")
def test_function():
    ...

The first example always skips the test, the second example allows you to conditionally skip tests (great when tests depend on the platform, executable version, or optional libraries.

For example, if I want to check if someone has the library pandas installed for a test.

import sys
try:
    import pandas as pd
except ImportError:
    pass

@pytest.mark.skipif('pandas' not in sys.modules,
                    reason="requires the Pandas library")
def test_pandas_function():
    ...

The skip decorator would do the job:

@pytest.mark.skip(reason="no way of currently testing this")
def test_func_one():
    # ...

(reason argument is optional, but it is always a good idea to specify why a test is skipped).

There is also skipif() that allows to disable a test if some specific condition is met.

---

These decorators can be applied to methods, functions or classes.

To skip all tests in a module, define a global pytestmark variable:

# test_module.py
pytestmark = pytest.mark.skipif(...)

You can mark a test with the skip and skipif decorators when you want to skip a test in pytest.

Skipping a test

@pytest.mark.skip(reason="no way of currently testing this")
def test_func_one():
    ...

The simplest way to skip a test is to mark it with the skip decorator which may be passed an optional reason.

It is also possible to skip imperatively during test execution or setup by calling the pytest.skip(reason) function. This is useful when it is not possible to evaluate the skip condition during import time.

def test_func_one():
    if not valid_config():
        pytest.skip("unsupported configuration")

Skipping a test based on a condition

@pytest.mark.skipif(sys.version_info < (3, 6), reason="requires python3.6 or higher")
def test_func_one():
    ...

If you want to skip based on a conditional then you can use skipif instead. In the previous example, the test function is skipped when run on an interpreter earlier than Python3.6.

Finally, if you want to skip a test because you are sure it is failing, you might also consider using the xfail marker to indicate that you expect a test to fail.

I'm not sure if it's deprecated, but you can also use the pytest.skip function inside of a test:

def test_valid_counting_number():
     number = random.randint(1,5)
     if number == 5:
         pytest.skip('Five is right out')
     assert number <= 3