How do I use the unittest setUpClass method()?

Question

I'm looking for some basic examples of the python 2.7 unittest setUpClass() method. I'm trying to test some class methods in my module, and I've gotten as far as:

import unittest  
import sys  

import mymodule  

class BookTests(unittest.TestCase):  
    @classmethod  
    def setUpClass(cls):  
        cls._mine = mymodule.myclass('test_file.txt', 'baz')  

But I have no idea how to proceed from here to write tests utilising the object I just created.

Answer 1

In your test methods you can now access the global class atribute _mine through self. So you can do something like this:

def test_something(self):
    self.assertEqual(self._mine.attribute, 'myAttribute')

Answer 2

If you're using Django 1.8+, you should use the setUpTestData method instead.

You can then set any attributes on the cls object, and access them via the individual test methods on the self object.

More information is in the Django docs .