pqaut

Automation for BDD testing PyQt apps

Requirements

pqaut requires:

• Qt 5.2 or greater
• Python 2.7 or greater
• PyQt 5.2 or greater

Getting Started

pqaut is a client / server library that enables BDD-style testing in your PyQt apps. We use pqaut with behave to make test assertions against our UI.

First, you need to get pqaut and behave installed. Assuming you are using pip, add them to your requirements.txt file and install them from PyPi.

Running the Automation Server

In your application, you need to run the pqaut server. It's good to put it behind a launch argument so that it only runs while you're testing. Here's an example of doing this in main.py of your PyQt app:

import pqaut.server

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if '--automation_server' in sys.argv:
        pqaut.server.start_automation_server()

  # Start up our Qt application down here

Setting up the Automation Client

Now we need to set up our first behave test to launch our app. In your features\environment.py file (create it if you don't have it, add something like this:

import subprocess
import pqaut.client

APP_PATH = '<path to your app>'

def launch_app():
    context.test_app_process = subprocess.Popen([APP_PATH, "--automation_server"])
    pqaut.client.wait_for_automation_server()

def kill_app():
    if context.test_app_process:
        subprocess.Popen.kill(context.test_app_process)

def before_scenario(context, scenario):
    launch_app()

def after_scenario(context, scenario):
    kill_app()

Testing the App

Now it's time to make assertions against the UI. Make a feature file features/hello_world.feature:

Feature: Hello World
  As a developer
  I want to do automated testing
  So I can refactor without worry

  Scenario: Hello World
    When I tap button "Say Hello"
    Then I see "Hello World!"

Make a steps definition file features/steps/hello_world_steps.py:

import pqaut.client
from behave import *

use_step_matcher("re")

@when(u'I tap button "(?P<button_text>[^"]*)"$')
def i_tap_button(step, button_text):
  pqaut.client.tap(button_text)

@then(u'I see "(?P<text>[^"]*)"$')
def i_see(step, text):
  pqaut.client.assert_is_visible(text)

This, of course, assumes your PyQt app has a button labeled 'Say Hello', and tapping that button will display the text 'Hello World!' somewhere. You should be able to run behave from your project directory and see the app launch and the button press down.

Other Examples

To see a practical example of pqaut in action, check out ci_screen.

Also, pqaut uses itself for testing. You can run behave from the project directory to run the tests, and see the Qt apps used for testing in the test_apps/ directory