Show a helpful pytest summary on GitHub Actions

Hello pythonists.

As we developers know, testing our code is one of the most important parts of our work. That’s why I’m here to show how I integrate my tests in my GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows, not only by running them, but also by getting a useful summary to understand which tests failed and why, without having to dig into the job logs of the GitHub workflows.

To achieve this goal I develop an easy-to-use action to integrate in your workflows.

Please note that my pytest-summary action is just an extension of the test-sum mary one.

Example

To follow the example, you need either to create a new repository or to use an existing one

In order to integrate the action in a workflow we need to create some tests to run, so let’s create 2 fake ones, one failing, one succeeding:

def test_false:
  assert False
def test_true:
  assert True

We save this file naming it test_fake.py in a folder called tests .

Once we created the tests, we can start to create our CI/CD workflow using the pytest-summary action.
So let’s create a file called validate.yml in the .github/workflows folder:

name: "Validate"
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  simple:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@main
- name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@main
        with:
          python-version: "3.10"
- name: Run tests
        uses: dariocurr/pytest-summary@main
        with:
         paths: tests/test_fake.py
           # or `tests/**`, `tests`
         options: --quiet 
           # keep pytest quite since there is the action summary
         show: all
           # show the summary for both successful and failed tests

Then let’s push our new files to GitHub.

Once pushed, since we added the workflow_dispatch option on the on clause, we are able to run the workflow on demand.
Then, let’s move to the Actions tab of our repository and select the Validate workflow on the left-hand list. Thus, click on theRun workflow button.

After half a minute we should have our result that should look like this

As we can see, since we used the show: all option, all the tests are reported in the summary.
Those that fails have an additional box showing the traceback of the error, so that it is easy to understand the reason of the failure.

Conclusion

I hope I have shown you the potential of this action and that it can be useful for your pipelines.
To know more about options and configuration, please visit the GitHub repository.