temp_dir

Change into newly created temporary directory for executing a block of code.

Upon leaving the code block the temporary directory and all its contents are removed and the original working directory is restored.

Intended as a tool to ease "integration" testing.

The package contains only two functions: in_temp_dir to be used with the with statement and within_temp_dir to decorate a function.

Examples

Function decorator:

@within_temp_dir
def f():
    return os.getcwd()


class TestScript(unittest.TestCase):

    @within_temp_dir
    def test_output_file_created(self):
        self.create_input_file()
        call_script('input')
        self.assertTrue(os.path.exists('output'))

Context manager:

with in_temp_dir():
    with open('tempfile', 'w') as f:
        f.write(...)
    process_file('tempfile')

Similar functionality elsewhere

Similar functionality can be found at

• test.test_support.temp_cwd (http://docs.python.org/3/library/test.html#test.support.temp_cwd) in the Python distribution - temp_cwd is quite close to this module, unfortunately it is not in the standard library, but packaged together with the regression tests. temp_cwd's source shows some special cases and runs the code in a directory that can be guessed
• tempdir (https://bitbucket.org/another_thomas/tempdir)
• tempdirs (https://github.com/thelinuxkid/tempdirs) - for creating any number of temporary directories
• path.py (https://github.com/jaraco/path.py/blob/master/path.py) - tempdir at the end of the file