This is a plugin to faciliate image comparison for Matplotlib figures in pytest.
Matplotlib includes a number of test utilities and decorators, but these are geared towards the nose testing framework. Pytest-mpl makes it easy to compare figures produced by tests to reference images when using pytest.
For each figure to test, the reference image is substracted from the
generated image, and the RMS of the residual is compared to a
user-specified tolerance. If the residual is too large, the test will
fail (this is implemented using helper functions from
matplotlib.testing).
For more information on how to write tests to do this, see the Using section below.
This plugin is compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.3 and later, and requires pytest, matplotlib and nose to be installed (nose is required by Matplotlib).
To install, you can do:
pip install pytest-mpl
You can check that the plugin is registered with pytest by doing:
py.test --version
which will show a list of plugins:
This is pytest version 2.7.1, imported from ... setuptools registered plugins: pytest-mpl-0.1 at ...
To use, you simply need to mark the function where you want to compare
images using @pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare, and make sure that the
function returns a Matplotlib figure (or any figure object that has a
savefig method):
import pytest
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare
def test_succeeds():
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)
ax.plot([1,2,3])
return figTo generate the baseline images, run the tests with the
--mpl-generate-path option with the name of the directory where the
generated images should be placed:
py.test --mpl-generate-path=baseline
If the directory does not exist, it will be created. The directory will
be interpreted as being relative to where you are running py.test.
Once you are happy with the generated images, you should move them to a
sub-directory called baseline relative to the test files (this name
is configurable, see below). You can also generate the baseline images
directly in the right directory.
You can then run the tests simply with:
py.test --mpl
and the tests will pass if the images are the same. If you omit the
--mpl option, the tests will run but will only check that the code
runs without checking the output images.
The RMS tolerance for the image comparison (which defaults to 2) can be
specified in the mpl_image_compare decorator with the tolerance
argument:
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare(tolerance=20)
def test_image():
...You can pass keyword arguments to savefig by using
savefig_kwargs in the mpl_image_compare decorator:
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare(savefig_kwargs={'dpi':300})
def test_image():
...The baseline directory (which defaults to baseline ) and the
filename of the plot (which defaults to the name of the test with a
.png suffix) can be customized with the baseline_dir and
filename arguments in the mpl_image_compare decorator:
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare(baseline_dir='baseline_images',
filename='other_name.png')
def test_image():
...The baseline directory in the decorator above will be interpreted as
being relative to the test file. Note that the baseline directory can
also be a URL (which should start with http:// or https:// and
end in a slash).
Finally, you can also set a custom baseline directory globally when
running tests by running py.test with:
py.test --mpl --mpl-baseline-path=baseline_images
This directory will be interpreted as being relative to where the tests
are run. In addition, if both this option and the baseline_dir
option in the mpl_image_compare decorator are used, the one in the
decorator takes precedence.
By default, tests will be run using the Matplotlib 'classic' style
(ignoring any locally defined RC parameters). This can be overriden by
using the style argument:
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare(style='fivethirtyeight')
def test_image():
...If you are running a test for which you are not interested in comparing
the text labels, you can use the remove_text argument to the
decorator:
@pytest.mark.mpl_image_compare(remove_text=True)
def test_image():
...This will make the test insensitive to changes in e.g. the freetype library.
If the images produced by the tests are correct, then the test will pass, but if they are not, the test will fail with a message similar to the following:
E Exception: Error: Image files did not match. E RMS Value: 142.2287807767823 E Expected: E /var/folders/zy/t1l3sx310d3d6p0kyxqzlrnr0000gr/T/tmp4h4oxr7y/baseline-coords_overlay_auto_coord_meta.png E Actual: E /var/folders/zy/t1l3sx310d3d6p0kyxqzlrnr0000gr/T/tmp4h4oxr7y/coords_overlay_auto_coord_meta.png E Difference: E /var/folders/zy/t1l3sx310d3d6p0kyxqzlrnr0000gr/T/tmp4h4oxr7y/coords_overlay_auto_coord_meta-failed-diff.png E Tolerance: E 10
The image paths included in the exception are then available for inspection:
| Expected | Actual | Difference |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
In this case, the differences are very clear, while in some cases it may be necessary to use the difference image, or blink the expected and actual images, in order to see what changed.
The default tolerance is 2, which is very strict. In some cases, you may want to relax this to account for differences in fonts across different systems.
By default, the expected, actual and difference files are written to a temporary directory with a non-deterministic path. If you want to instead write them to a specific directory, you can use:
py.test --mpl --mpl-results-path=results
The results directory will then contain one sub-directory per test, and each
sub-directory will contain the three files mentioned above. If you are using a
continuous integration service, you can then use the option to upload artifacts
to upload these results to somewhere where you can view them. For more
information, see:
If you are contributing some changes and want to run the tests, first install the latest version of the plugin then do:
cd tests py.test --mpl
The reason for having to install the plugin first is to ensure that the plugin is correctly loaded as part of the test suite.