I am new to Python development, I am writing test cases using pytest where I need to mock some behavior. Googling best mocking library for pytest, has only confused me. I have seen unittest.mock, mock, mocker and pytest-mock. Not really sure which one to use. Can someone please explain me the difference between them and also recommend me one?
pytest-mock is a thin wrapper around mock.
mock is since python 3.3. actually the same as unittest.mock.
I don't know if mocker is another library, I only know it as the name of the fixture provided by pytest-mock to get mocking done in your tests.
I personally use pytest and pytest-mock for my tests, which allows you to write very concise tests like
from pytest_mock import MockerFixture
@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def something_to_be_mocked_everywhere(mocker):
mocker.patch()
def tests_this(mocker: MockerFixture):
mocker.patch ...
a_mock = mocker.Mock() ...
...
But this is mainly due to using fixtures, which is already pointed out is what pytest-mock offers.