changing order of unit tests in Python

Question

How can I make it so unit tests in Python (using unittest) are run in the order in which they are specified in the file?

Answer 1

You can change the default sorting behavior by setting a custom comparison function. In unittest.py you can find the class variable unittest.TestLoader.sortTestMethodsUsing which is set to the builtin function cmp by default.

For example you can revert the execution order of your tests with doing this:

import unittest
unittest.TestLoader.sortTestMethodsUsing = lambda _, x, y: cmp(y, x)