I tend to use Mock more as a stubbing library rather than for mocking. The patch decorator is pretty handy in terms of this as it takes care of all the resetting once your stubbed test has run making it easy to have a test where a dependency returns an empty list, followed by a single-entry list and so on.

However I often forget how exactly it works so I’ve decided to write up my latest remembering of how to do this (via John Hartley’s help and reminders) so I have something to look up next time I forget.

The first thing is that the patch decorator takes a string that represents the fully qualified name of the stub/mock you want to create. In a Django app for example that means you should include the app name at the root. The name also reflects the local name of an imported item. Something I commonly do wrong is to bind to the absolute name, say ‘random.choice’ rather than ‘myapp.mymodule.random.choice’. If you are in the situation where your stub is correct when you call it directly but never happens when you run the code under test I am pretty sure that naming will be at the root of your problems 95% of the time.

For each string argument you have in patch you also need to define a parameter to the test function, this will contain the actual Mock object and is what you use to actually stub the value to what you want it to be for the test. Use names that make sense here, stub_db, fake_file_reader not just mock1, mock2 and so on.

With these relatively few reminders in place you should now be in a position to stub simply with Mock!