Running automated functional tests in a CI/CD pipeline

One of the most common tasks in a CI/CD pipeline is running automated functional tests to make sure your code does what it’s supposed to do. For example, you might want to use the pytest framework to run a collection of unit tests written in Python to test your Python-based Hats for Cats app. Let’s see how to do that with GitLab.

Note

If you’re not familiar with pytest, don’t worry. The syntax for pytest unit tests is extremely simple and can be understood by anyone with even a little experience of writing automated tests in any language.

Enabling automated functional tests

Imagine that you’ve written three pytest-based unit tests to make sure the Hats for Cats app’s login feature works as expected. You might have a file called test/test_login.py with these contents:

def test_login():
    # add code that tries to log in with good credentials
  ...