Wrong path referenced for failing test

[felixriese]

I locally moved my project folder project/ to another directory from /files/old/path/project to /files/new/project. Then, I ran the tests with pytest, which works as expected - except the shown path to a test file when a test fails [output is censored]:

E   AssertionError: assert 'something' == <something_else'>
E     - something
E     ?          ^^
E     + something_else
E     ?          ^^^

/files/old/path/project/tests/test_something.py:30: AssertionError

When I run pytest --vvv, I get:

project/tests/test_something.py::TestName::test_something[SUCCESS-something] <- ../../project/tests/test_something.py FAILED [ 25%]

which shows the relative path to the old directory.

Expected behavior: The old directory is not shown anywhere.

---

pyproject.toml:

[tool.pytest.ini_options]
minversion = "7.1.2"
addopts = "--cov=app/ --cov-report html --cov-report term"
testpaths = [
    "tests"
]
required_plugins = ["pytest-cov", "pytest-mock"]
pythonpath = ["app"]

Setup on macOS 12.5 (M1):

platform darwin -- Python 3.9.7, pytest-7.1.2, pluggy-1.0.0 -- /Users/name/miniforge3/envs/env-name/bin/python3.9
cachedir: .pytest_cache
django: settings: backend.server.settings (from ini)
rootdir: /files/new/, configfile: pyproject.toml, testpaths: project/tests
plugins: anyio-3.5.0, env-0.6.2, dash-2.5.0, mock-3.8.2, django-4.5.2, cov-3.0.0

[felixriese]

Update: Interestingly, this behavior can be observed only for some tests, the other are not linked to the old directory.

[felixriese]

Update 2: the issue is gone. Nothing has been changed. I cannot understand what happened.

(this issue can be closed if there is no value in discussing it. I would still keep it in GitHub since I might not be the only one with this issue)

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Did you possibly rename the complete folder, pyc files cache the initial filename, so a stale byte code cache Could be a reason

Are any pytest options in use that may prevent the mismatch error that's supposed to happen then

[nicoddemus]

I locally moved my project folder project/ to another directory from /files/old/path/project to /files/new/project.
Did you possibly rename the complete folder, pyc files cache the initial filename, so a stale byte code cache Could be a reason

Pretty sure that's what happened, stale .pyc files, especially if it just went away after awhile.

Closing this for now then. 👍

[felixriese]

That could have been it. Thanks! 👍

[egor83]

I ran into a very similar problem; Ronny, thanks a lot for pointing me to the solution!

More details

Basically I am normally running tests locally against a DB in Docker; I ran tests via Docker once, and since then pytest stopped showing me traceback for the failed tests, only showing > ??? instead.
What seems to have happened is the following:

• running tests via Docker created Python cache (__pycache__/*.pyc) owned by root;
• re-running tests locally picked up that cached bytecode (either couldn't or didn't try to delete/overwrite it), tried accessing source code with the path hardcoded in cache (that is, with paths as they are in Docker), and failed.

Once I deleted cached files, it started working again.