I’ve been recently working on some big changes to a big module in a big Python application. For this precise module, there are 1019 unit tests, most of them auto-generated from a few (big) data files. The tests are run using pytest, and usually take about 7 seconds to run on my laptop.

My changes caused a single test to fail. One out of 1019. Yay? Well, time to debug that: let’s add some print() in a few functions, and run just that test using pytest path/to/file.py -k test_name… And now it takes 35 seconds to run, and prints thouands and thousands of messages. WTF? Well, turns out that one of the functions in which I added print() is used to parse the data files during the collection phase, so all my print()s are called many, many, many times…

A perfect solution to this would be to have something that works just like print(), but actually does nothing most of the time, and only does when it’s explicitely enabled. And that’s actually pretty easy to do in Python using a context manager 🙂

Without further ado, here it is:

from __future__ import print_function

class Boomer(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.level = 0
        self.calls = 0

    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.calls += 1
        if self.level > 0:
            print(*args, **kwargs)

    def __enter__(self):
        self.level += 1
        return self

    def __exit__(self, *exc):
        self.level -= 1
        if self.level == 0:
            print("boom was called %d times!" % self.calls)

boom = Boomer()

That’s it. No dependency, less than 20 lines of code, works with Python 2 and 3. Just copy-paste it in any of your files. Then, instead of using print(), use boom(). And when you want to enable printing with boom, just use it as a context manager:

def foo(arg):
   boom(arg)

foo("not displayed")
foo("still not displayed")
with boom:
    foo("this is displayed!")

For extra fun, I added a calls counter. Know I know that in my case, collecting the test cases + running a single tests caused boom() to be called 1,125,545 times 😅