[Feature request] Setup and teardown for tests

[Adrien-Bodineau]

What about introducing new tests attributes for edition 2024 to allow global setup/teardown in tests ?

Something like

#[setup]
fn foo() {
    // do stuff...
}

#[teardown]
fn bar() {
    // undo stuff...
}

setup would run before all tests in its module and teardown after

[epage]

FYI this is also being discussed at rust-lang/rust#117668.

Quoting myself from over there:

FYI this is owned by libtest which is in the rust repo, and not cargo. We've also recently formed a testing-devex team to focus on improving the workflows around tests in a cross-team way.

As this is a fairly fundamental change, I would recommend experimenting in a library first for these ideas (pytest-rs is where my experiments live) and then bringing that proposal forward on internals.

However, this is unlikely to happen, directly. Last I talked to the libs team, we walked away with the idea that we'd work to make harness=false harnesses first class citizens and focus on feature development there, rather than in libtest. pytest-rs is my experiment towards that goal.

For myself, I see setup and teardown to be redundant with fixture and anti-patterns as they tend towards "god fixtuures" that encompass too much and slow down tests. The proposal given also doesn't provide a way to pass state from setup to the test to teardown and doesn't cover process-wide vs test-wide setup/teardown.