How do you execute unit-tests that require third-party applications? We have a monorepo with go and python microservices and some tests of some services do need a PostgreSQL instance and/or other service(s) to be run before the execution. With classic CI/CD approach we just define these dependencies (db, other services) in

docker-compose

file, where required, and run

docker-compose up

prior to executing

pytest

, for example. So the layout of monorepo looks roughly like this:

└── services
  ├── go-service-1
  │  └── <CODEBASE>
  │  └── docker-compose.yaml
  ├── py-service-1
  │  └── <CODEBASE>
  │  └── docker-compose.yaml
  └── py-service-2
  │  └── <CODEBASE>
    └── docker-compose.yaml

But I don’t see a clear way for

pants

to understand that it need to execute

docker-compose up

in a directory

path/to/service/foo

upon a code-change of that service foo And the use-case is quite common, so perhaps it’s solved somehow differently? Maybe I need to employ

experimental_shell_command

to spin up DBs and set some envs for unit tests to consume? Basically, that’s the only stopping factor of us starting to adopt

pants

— i simply don’t understand how to solve my issue at hand..

We don't have very strong support for this sort of thing yet, to be honest. One way could be to depend on an

experimental_shell_command

(although that doesn't give you teardown at the end). Another is to lean on

conftest.py

, but because that runs for every test file (Pants invokes pytest on each test file separately, for better concurrency and caching) that may not work for setting up global state without a lot of complication.

No, that's about the state of it. We don't have explicit support for launching long lived daemons.

Another is to lean on

conftest.py

but it doesn’t resolve the case for non-python codebases, and the solution begs to be language-agnostic, I’d say Do you think

pants

should handle it or rather rely on some tooling instead?

@rough-electrician-21871 could you open a ticket for this at https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues ? I agree that Pants should solve this

@happy-kitchen-89482 just opened this one