`tests` are shipped as a module with the package

[fpgmaas]

What is the problem?

tests directory is shipped as part of the package. This can be a problem, since many projects contain a tests directory themselves. For example, this can be a problem for projects that import from their tests directory while running the tests.
The reason for this is that the module tests is now ambiguous; it refers both to tests in the virtual environment, and to the tests directory in their project. This will lead to errors while running the unit tests like:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tests.utils'

The issue can be confirmed with the following steps:

pip download --no-deps --only-binary=:all: msal-extensions==1.3.0
unzip msal_extensions-1.3.0-py3-none-any.whl -d extracted_wheel
ls -1 extracted_wheel 

This shows the following directories exist in the wheel file:

msal_extensions
msal_extensions-1.3.0.dist-info 
tests

How to solve this?

tests should not be shipped with the msal-extensions package. Probably the line packages=find_packages() in setup.py should be modified.

[fpgmaas]

Opened a PR that I think should fix this here.

[rayluo]

Thanks for the catch. I intend to merge your PR #139 for cleaning purpose, if nothing else.

Out of curiosity, how bad is it for the shipped MSAL EX 1.3.0, though? Do we have to ship this fix quick? What actual issue did you run into, @fpgmaas , @mpkuth? I did some quick tests, and it seems a project can still pick up their own tests folder.

py311demo@antix1:/tmp$ python -c "import tests as t; print(t)"
<module 'tests' from '/tmp/tests/__init__.py'>

py311demo@antix1:/tmp$ cd dir_without_tests
/tmp/dir_without_tests
py311demo@antix1:/tmp/dir_without_tests$ python -c "import tests as t; print(t)"
<module 'tests' from '/home/demo/Live-usb-storage/repo/microsoft-authentication-extensions-for-python/.tox/py311/lib/python3.11/site-packages/tests/__init__.py'>

UPDATE:

The example in my tests above used a tests folder with a __init__.py file, and the import was able to locate it first, regardless of whether a package tests exists in site-packages. But if I remove that __init__.py file, the import indeed hits the package tests exists in site-packages. This subtle import behavior difference is likely the root cause.

py311demo@antix1:/tmp$ rm tests/__init__.py 
py311demo@antix1:/tmp$ python -c "import tests as t; print(t)"
<module 'tests' from '/home/demo/Live-usb-storage/repo/microsoft-authentication-extensions-for-python/.tox/py311/lib/python3.11/site-packages/tests/__init__.py'>

@mpkuth rightfully pointed out that the __init__.py-less tests folder is likely common.

In any case, the tests will be removed from msal-extensions' next release, coming soon.

[fpgmaas]

@rayluo For some of my projects it breaks the CI/CD pipelines. I created a small reproducible example here. The unit tests succeed without msal-extensions, but they fail when msal-extensions is added as a dependency.

There are some workarounds of course;

• I can pin msal-extensions to 1.2.0 since the latest version of azure-identity depends on >=1.2.0
• move tests.utils to test_utils.

So it is not very urgent, but I still think a 1.3.1 release would be nice to release quickly in this case to prevent users of the package from having to modify their projects.

[mpkuth]

We use the same structure as the example provided by @fpgmaas. The update caused pytest to fail with

ImportError: cannot import name 'utils' from 'tests'
(<path>/site-packages/x64/prod/tests/__init__.py)

Eventually we tracked down the wayward tests folder in site-packages to this package based on its contents.

We worked around it by adding __init__.py to our tests folder and changing the imports

-from tests import utils
+from . import utils

The layout we use is suggested in the pytest docs, so I think this change has the potential to affect a lot of folks.
https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/explanation/goodpractices.html#tests-outside-application-code

[rayluo]

Thanks @fpgmaas for going extra mile to set up a repo for repro. And thanks @mpkuth for rightfully pointed out that the __init__.py-less tests folder is likely common. I have also appended more test findings into my previous message above.

The tests will be removed from msal-extensions' next release, coming soon.

[rayluo]

Version 1.3.1 is shipped.