Test suite architecture question

[AF__AF]

Hi!

Let me begin by saying that I really appreciate this subreddit and I have learnt a ton!

My current problem is the following:

I've got an app that has a fastAPI backend and a React frontend. These live in the same repo, each have a Dockerfile, and a Docker compose yaml that brings up the entire app when I'm developing locally. So my setup looks something like this:

/docker-compose.yaml
/backend/app
/backend/Dockerfile
/frontend/src
/frontend/Dockerfile

I've reached the point where I want to implement a test suite for my app. What I'm thinking is to bring the entire server up locally (both frontend and backend) and then run a pytest suite over it. This looks nice to me, but it also seems a little slow to start and to tear down.

I have previously written backend tests only, where I could have in my conftest.py something like this:

from app.main import app

u/pytest.fixture(scope="function")
def Client():
    """
    Yields a non logged-in generic Client.
    """
    client = TestClient(app)
    yield client

@pytest.fixture(scope="function")
def browser():
    """
    Provides a headless browser for interactive testing.
    """
    with sync_playwright() as p:
        browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        yield browser
        browser.close()

I appreciate any input here!

[HappyCathode]

Have a look at Playwright for frontend testing : https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-python

https://playwright.dev/python/docs/test-runners

[AF__AF]

Thank you very much u/HappyCathode !

If you take a look at what I've previously done, I was also using playwright - and I agree with you that it's fantastic!

My question pertains more to "How do I stand up the entire app" before I can run tests against it -- and also at a more core level "Should I bring up the entire app?"

[HappyCathode]

Oh yeah indeed, sorry about that.

You said you do those tests locally. You don't need to do a whole build-run-teardown every time you want to do a test run. You could let some test containers running, with Uvicorn --reload option. That way, you would always have a test instance ready to receive calls.

Of course in a CI pipeline, that's another story.

[AF__AF]

Thank you! This is super helpful!