Quiet down ‘faker’ in pytests¶

Tags: django, python

Faker is a nice library for creating sample data for tests. No more company called “example company” and no more email address “something@example.org”. No, you get readable random proper email addresses and company names and so. Handy in combination with factory_boy, which provides integration. Here’s an example:

from myproject import models
import factory


class PersonF(factory.DjangoModelFactory):
    class Meta:
        model = models.Person

    email = factory.Faker("email")
    name = factory.Faker("name")
    password = factory.Faker("password")


class TeamF(factory.DjangoModelFactory):
    class Meta:
        model = models.Team

    name = factory.Faker("company")

Problem I’m having is that, when running the tests with pytest, pytest helpfully reports all the logging when something goes wrong. Only, tests related to factory_boy/faker fill the log with locale-related messages:

factory.py 97  DEBUG Looking for locale `en_US` in provider `faker.providers.address`.
factory.py 111 DEBUG Provider `faker.providers.address` has been localized to `en_US`.
factory.py 97  DEBUG Looking for locale `en_US` in provider `faker.providers.automotive`.
factory.py 111 DEBUG Provider `faker.providers.automotive` has been localized to `en_US`.
factory.py 97  DEBUG Looking for locale `en_US` in provider `faker.providers.bank`.

Which makes it harder to spot the actual error.

There’s been a recent helpful change to faker, reducing those log messages from INFO to DEBUG. So fixing these extraneous messages was as simple as including these lines at the top of my factories.py:

import logging
logger = logging.getLogger('faker')
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)  # Quiet faker locale messages down in tests.

Reinout van Rees

My name is Reinout van Rees and I program in Python, I live in the Netherlands, I cycle recumbent bikes and I have a model railway.

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