The Hypothesis example database¶
When Hypothesis finds a bug it stores enough information in its database to reproduce it. This enables you to have a classic testing workflow of find a bug, fix a bug, and be confident that this is actually doing the right thing because Hypothesis will start by retrying the examples that broke things last time.
Limitations¶
The database is best thought of as a cache that you never need to invalidate: Information may be lost when you upgrade a Hypothesis version or change your test, so you shouldn’t rely on it for correctness - if there’s an example you want to ensure occurs each time then there’s a feature for including them in your source code - but it helps the development workflow considerably by making sure that the examples you’ve just found are reproduced.
The database also records examples that exercise less-used parts of your code, so the database may update even when no failing examples were found.
Upgrading Hypothesis and changing your tests¶
The design of the Hypothesis database is such that you can put arbitrary data in the database and not get wrong behaviour. When you upgrade Hypothesis, old data might be invalidated, but this should happen transparently. It can never be the case that e.g. changing the strategy that generates an argument gives you data from the old strategy.
ExampleDatabase implementations¶
Hypothesis’ default database
setting creates a
DirectoryBasedExampleDatabase
in your current working directory,
under .hypothesis/examples
. If this location is unusable, e.g. because you do not have
read or write permissions, Hypothesis will emit a warning and fall back to an
InMemoryExampleDatabase
.
Hypothesis provides the following ExampleDatabase
implementations:
-
class
hypothesis.database.
InMemoryExampleDatabase
(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶ A non-persistent example database, implemented in terms of a dict of sets.
This can be useful if you call a test function several times in a single session, or for testing other database implementations, but because it does not persist between runs we do not recommend it for general use.
Defining your own ExampleDatabase¶
You can define your ExampleDatabase
, for example
to use a shared datastore, with just a few methods:
-
class
hypothesis.database.
ExampleDatabase
(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶ An abstract base class for storing examples in Hypothesis’ internal format.
An ExampleDatabase maps each
bytes
key to many distinctbytes
values, like aMapping[bytes, AbstractSet[bytes]]
.-
abstract
save
(key, value)[source]¶ Save
value
underkey
.If this value is already present for this key, silently do nothing.
-
abstract