Command Line Options

Additionally to handling initialization, termination and logging of external process for you, pytest-xprocess also offers an easy way of manually managing long running processes that must persist across multiple test runs with --xshow and --xkill command line utilities.

Listing Long-running Processes with --xshow

You can query pytest-xprocess for the state and information of all previously started processes by invoking pytest command and passing the --xshow option:

$ pytest --xshow

10598 redis-server LIVE <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/redis-server/xprocess.log
10599 memcached DEAD <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/memcached/xprocess.log
10600 db-service LIVE <path>/pytest-xprocess/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/db-service/xprocess.log

As we can see, xprocess will list the state of all invoked processes along with some relevant information, namely: PID, process name, state (ALIVE or DEAD) and path to the process log file.

Terminating Long-running Processes with --xkill

Besides quering for information on long-running processes, it’s also possible to terminate any of these processes started by pytest-xprocess by invoking pytest command and passing --xkill option. Following is a simple example. Let’s start by listing all processes:

$ pytest --xshow

10598 redis-server LIVE <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/redis-server/xprocess.log
10599 memcached LIVE <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/memcached/xprocess.log
10600 db-service LIVE <path>/pytest-xprocess/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/db-service/xprocess.log

Now, let’s terminate the first one of PID 10598, redis-server:

$ pytest --xkill redis-server

10598 redis-server TERMINATED <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/redis-server/xprocess.log

If we check the processes states again, we can see that redis-server is now DEAD:

$ pytest --xshow

10598 redis-server DEAD <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/redis-server/xprocess.log
10599 memcached LIVE <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/memcached/xprocess.log
10600 db-service LIVE <path>/pytest-xprocess/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/db-service/xprocess.log

We call also kill all processes started by pytest-xprocess by only passing --xkill without a name:

$ pytest --xkill # this will kill all processes
  ...
$ pytest --xshow

10598 redis-server DEAD <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/redis-server/xprocess.log
10599 memcached DEAD <path>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/memcached/xprocess.log
10600 db-service DEAD <path>/pytest-xprocess/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/db-service/xprocess.log