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Pytest doesn’t play nicely with ipdb

To ensure breakpoint() triggers ipdb as my default debugger, I used to set:

PYTHONBREAKPOINT=ipdb.set_trace`

in ~/.bash_profile (following this advice). However, this doesn’t play nicely with Pytest’s output capturing.

Pytest has a useful feature where it disables output capturing if breakpoint is called during test execution, which allows access to the debugger prompt. However, this only works if PYTHONBREAKPOINT is unset. If you have PYTHONBREAKPOINT set to a non-empty value, then you need to use Pytest’s -s option to disable all output capturing. But this isn’t generally desirable as it can lead to lots of unnecessary output being printed to your terminal during test runs.

Specifying --pdbcls=IPython.terminal.debugger:Pdb doesn’t make any difference if PYTHONBREAKPOINT is set.

A decent work-around is to not set PYTHONBREAKPOINT globally and install pdb++ which provides much of the benefit of ipdb (e.g. syntax highlighting, tab completion) but doesn’t suffer from the above problem; you can access the debugger without using the -s option.

For projects that use ipdb, you can set PYTHONBREAKPOINT on a per-project basis.