Nose or pytest drop in to interactive console when running tests

Question

When running nosetests I would like to drop in to an interactive console. However if I put the following anywhere in my code:

import code
code.interact(local=locals())

Nose just prints (InteractiveConsole) and does not provides the console to type in commands. Pytest treats code.interact as a failure. Is there a way I can drop into the console when running tests while also watching files for changes?

Answer 1

One way to get an interactive session under pytest is to set a breakpoint with

import pdb
pdb.set_trace()

Normally, pytest will supress this interactive session and will just hang when it hits the breakpoint. You can get around that by running pytest with the -s flag, which disables command line output capturing.

In the newest version of pytest, you can just use pytest.set_trace() without the -s flag to get the same behavior. See the docs for info.