In this article, we will see how to temporarily disable certain unit test cases in python.

Disabling certain unit test cases can be useful for debugging purposes to isolate issues or focus on other parts of the codebase without removing the entire test cases.

skip method from unittest module

The unittest module in python provides a skip Decorator to skip individual test cases. Import the unittest module and create a TestClass by inheriting unittest.TestCase.

Now, use the unittest.skip decorator to skip this test case. skip method accepts an optional parameter i.e. reason.

import unittest

class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    
    @unittest.skip("Skipping this test temporarily")
    def test_example(self):
        self.assertEqual(1, 1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

skipIf method from unittest module

Using the skipIf decorator we can skip the tests based on the condition.

The skipIf decorator allows us to skip tests based on a condition. It takes two parameters i.e. the condition & the reason explaining why the test is skipped.

If the condition evaluates to True, the test method is skipped, and the message which we have provided will be displayed.

See the following example for more information on this

import unittest

class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    
    skip_test = True
 
    @unittest.skipIf(skip_test, "Skipping this test based on a condition")
    def test_example(self):
        self.assertEqual(1, 1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

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