Installation

The pyfakefs project is hosted on PyPi and can be installed:

pip install pyfakefs

Motivation

Many Python scripts deal with direct file manipulation; testing such code normally requires a ton of testdata files (a real PITA) or lots of mocking using a layer over the raw I/O modules. Even working with a mocking layer might not be desirable considering that mocking every call which does file manipulation in a Python script would be tedious and repetitive.

History

pyfakefs.py was developed initially as a modest fake implementation of core Python modules to support moderately complex file system interactions, and was introduced Google-wide via Testing on the Toilet in September 2006. Since then, it has received many (well-tested) contributions to extend its functionality and usefulness, and is used in over 2,000 Google Python tests.

Contributing

See the Contributing wiki page for details on how to submit patches for review.