Nutty idea to make tests faster and more reliable

[msabramo]

It's late and I should probably be going to sleep so this might be nuts.

A lot of test failures and slowness I think come from the fact that the tests install stuff from PyPI.

What if the pip tests could spin up a mini PyPI server that runs locally? Presumably getting PyPI or Warehouse to work would be too much of a pain because of databases and all that jazz, but maybe a SimpleHTTPServer serving up a directory full of tarballs?

[dstufft]

This is something I think we should have. It might need to be more complicated than a SimpleHTTPServer (but then again, maybe not? I don't know). It would speed things up since everything would be happening over localhost and it would reduce the intermittent failures. We could probably steal from pytest-dbfixtures a way to spin up a service in the background and then shut it down when the session is over (or not, I don't know). Ideally nothing would be required to do except run the test suite, it should spin up it's own test server instance.

[qwcode]

If I may be so bold, in the interest of reducing the issue count, close this as a dupe to #259.... : )

[msabramo]

Yeah, I remember now that pytest-httpbin forks a process with httpbin, a simple Flask app, so I don't see why we couldn't do the same.

[msabramo]

Closing issues is good 😄