unit testing - how to mock function call used by imported pypi library in python

Question

I have the following code that I'm trying to test:

great_report.py

from retry import retry

@retry((ReportNotReadyException), tries=3, delay=10, backoff=3)
def get_link(self):
    report_link = _get_report_link_from_3rd_party(params)
    if report_link:
        return report_link
    else:
        stats.count("report_not_ready", 1)
        raise ReportNotReadyException

I've got my testing function which mocks _get_report_link_from_3rd_party which tests everything but I don't want this function to actually pause execution during when I run tests..

@mock.patch('repo.great_report._get_report_link_from_3rd_party', return_value=None)
test_get_link_raises_exception(self, mock_get_report_link):
    self.assertRaises(ReportNotReadyException, get_link)

I tried mocking the retry parameters but am running into issues where get_link keeps retrying over and over which causes long build times instead of just raising the exception and continuing. How can I mock the parameters for the @retry call in my test?

Answer 1

As hinted here, an easy way to prevent the actual sleeping is by patching the time.sleep function. Here is the code that did that for me:

@patch('time.sleep', side_effect = lambda _: None)