It seems that stopall doesn't work when do start patch.dict to sys.modules.
I show sample scripts the following.

Using stopall test case seems to always refer the first mock foo object.
But using stop it refers a new mock foo object.

$ cat test_sampmod.py
import foo

def myfunc():
    print "myfunc foo=%s" % foo
    return foo
$ cat test_samp.py
import mock
import sys
import unittest


class SampTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.foo_mod = mock.Mock()
        self.m = mock.patch.dict('sys.modules', {'foo': self.foo_mod})
        self.p = self.m.start()
        print "foo_mod=%s" % self.foo_mod
        __import__('test_sampmod')
        self.test_sampmod = sys.modules['test_sampmod']

    def tearDown(self):
        if len(sys.argv) > 1:
            self.m.stop()
            print ">>> stop patch"
        else:
            mock.patch.stopall()
            print ">>> stopall patch"

    def test_samp1(self):
        self.assertEqual(self.foo_mod, self.test_sampmod.myfunc())

    def test_samp2(self):
        self.assertEqual(self.foo_mod, self.test_sampmod.myfunc())

    def test_samp3(self):
        self.assertEqual(self.foo_mod, self.test_sampmod.myfunc())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    suite.addTest(unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(SampTestCase))
    unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(suite)
$ python test_samp.py stop
test_samp1 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='41504336'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='41504336'>
>>> stop patch
ok
test_samp2 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='41504464'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='41504464'>
>>> stop patch
ok
test_samp3 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='41504720'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='41504720'>
>>> stop patch
ok

Ran 3 tests in 0.004s

OK
$ python test_samp.py
test_samp1 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='19152464'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='19152464'>
>>> stopall patch
ok
test_samp2 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='19152592'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='19152464'>
FAIL
>>> stopall patch
test_samp3 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='19182096'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='19152464'>
FAIL
>>> stopall patch

======================================================================
FAIL: test_samp2 (main.SampTestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_samp.py", line 27, in test_samp2
    self.assertEqual(self.foo_mod, self.test_sampmod.myfunc())
AssertionError: <Mock id='19152592'> != <Mock id='19152464'>

======================================================================
FAIL: test_samp3 (main.SampTestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_samp.py", line 30, in test_samp3
    self.assertEqual(self.foo_mod, self.test_sampmod.myfunc())
AssertionError: <Mock id='19182096'> != <Mock id='19152464'>

Ran 3 tests in 0.003s

FAILED (failures=2)
$

Checking mock.py(version 1.0.1) it seems that patch.stopall does not support patch.dict. Does it have any problem to support ptch.dict by stopall.
I made the attached patch file for this. It seems to work well. How about this?

But I don't know why sys.modules refers the first mock object.

$ python test_samp.py
test_samp1 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='140164117280080'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='140164117280080'>
>>> stopall patch
ok
test_samp2 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='140164117280208'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='140164117280208'>
>>> stopall patch
ok
test_samp3 (__main__.SampTestCase) ... foo_mod=<Mock id='140164117280464'>
myfunc foo=<Mock id='140164117280464'>
>>> stopall patch
ok

Ran 3 tests in 0.001s

OK
$

Yep, patch.dict wasn't designed with stopall in mind so it needs adding. Thanks for pointing this out and your fix.

Your patch isn't quite right, those operations shouldn't be inside the try excepts. (And there are no tests.)

Thank you for your reply.
Yes, you are right. The patch was too slapdash. I re-created it and added unit tests.

That's better - thanks. Another minor tweak needed though. stopall should only stop patches that were started with "start", not those used as context managers or decorators (or they will be stopped twice!).

See how the main patch object only adds to the set of active patches in the start method, not in __enter__ (and removes in stop rather than __exit__).

Hi michael,
Certainly, thank you for your many advices. I attached the new patch file.

That looks great - thanks! I'll get it committed shortly.

Thank you in advance.

What's the status on this?

It just needs committing, I believe Kushal Das has volunteered to do it.

I will do that. New job is taking time.

FYI, you probably don't want to be patching out sys.modules. It isn't guaranteed that doing so will have the expected effect on import semantics.

why not?

Patching sys.modules is an idea I got from the official documentation

https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html#patch-dict

http://mock.readthedocs.org/en/latest/patch.html#patch-dict

At least for CPython sys.modules is initially set to the modules dict on the interpreter struct. As of 3.4 the import system itself only cares about sys.modules (I'll have to double check on builtin___import__). However, if I recall correctly at least part of the import C-API interacts directly with the original interpreter copy of the modules dict.

The catch is that setting sys.modules to something else does not also change the dict on the interpreter struct. So they will be out of sync. This may cause problems. In practice I don't think it's a big deal, but there is no guarantee that patching out sys.modules will give you the behavior that you expect.

See also issue bpo-12633.

Using patch.dict manipulates the contents of sys.modules, it doesn't replace sys.modules.

Ah. Never mind then. :)

Hi,

It's been 3 years now since this issue was first raised.
We bumped upon this issue while using code like following:

def tearDown():
    patch.stopall()

def test123():
    p=patch.dict(...)
    p.start()
    assert False
    p.stop()

While patch.stopall() is run, it doesn't stop anything. This is because p.start() in fact executes mock._patch_dict._patch_dict(), which does not execute self._active_patches.append(self) (like ordinary p=patch(...).start() would).

I could understand that this is just a design choice (which may seem unintuitive for me, but possibly perfectly good for others), however the official documentation [1] states:

All the patchers have start() and stop() methods.

And few lines below [2], we have:

patch.stopall() Stop all active patches. Only stops patches started with start.

The above is not true for patch.dict(), so the documentation is unfortunatelly misleading.

Is there a possibility to fix this in some 3.5 maintenance release (preferably code, not docs :) )?

If anyone else will have the same issue: for now a workaround would be to use patch.dict() either as a decorator, or as a context manager (with patch.dict()).

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html#patch-methods-start-and-stop
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html#unittest.mock.patch.stopall

Hi,

Any chance of getting this resolved 1 year later? :)

BR

This sounds like a good idea given the docs and the general agreement in the thread. I would like to target this for 3.9 . Differentiation between the normal patches and the ones from patch.dict is nice but given that docstring indicates LIFO for all active patches storing patch.dict items also in _patch.active_patches ensures we can do LIFO if there is a mixture of normal and dictionary patches started with start method. Adding other maintainers for thoughts.

diff --git Lib/unittest/mock.py Lib/unittest/mock.py
index cd5a2aeb60..96115e06ba 100644
--- Lib/unittest/mock.py
+++ Lib/unittest/mock.py
@@ -1853,8 +1853,21 @@ class _patch_dict(object):
self._unpatch_dict()
return False

-    start = __enter__
-    stop = __exit__
+    def start(self):
+        """Activate a patch, returning any created mock."""
+        result = self.__enter__()
+        _patch._active_patches.append(self)
+        return result
+
+    def stop(self):
+        """Stop an active patch."""
+        try:
+            _patch._active_patches.remove(self)
+        except ValueError:
+            # If the patch hasn't been started this will fail
+            pass
+
+        return self.__exit__()

Makes total sense, I think we should get this for 3.9.
Not sure I'll backport this, even if a bugfix it might cause unexpected changes (Though I'd be OK with it, given that calling stop twice causes no issue).

I'm happy to push a PR with the proposed change and some tests if you want @XTreak. This is quite a simple fix we can get through in a short time.

Thanks Mario. I think the last patch attached to the issue is complete with tests and needs to be updated master. Feel free to raise a PR.