Anyway to disable --noconftest?

[walrusVision]

Hi All

I'm trying to build in session fixtures into my conftest which provide a layer of safety to ensure that they cannot be run in the wrong environment. However I noticed that pytest come with an option --noconftest which appears to mean a developer could bypass any of those safe guards by not loading the conftest.

I'm trying to find if there is anyway to disable this flag for this project, but there doesn't appear to be an obvious way to do this.

Of course I can't put anything in the conftest itself, since its not loaded. The only option I've been able to work out, its to ensure that every module has an autouse session fixture which depends on the one in the conftest, which will cause them to all error out because they can't find the unloaded fixture name.

Is there a way to disable this, or best practices about this?

Thanks

[walrusVision]

Thank you for the response @apoorva-01. Yes we are mainly just guarding against accidents. Unfortunately what I'm guarding around is less credentials, and more environment such as mounts. We are putting in other safeguards on the dev machine, but I'm just trying to be particularly paranoid in this case, and so this is just one layer of guards in many layers.

I had managed to come to the same conclusion about the pytest_configure, except I was passing it in via -p, but I didn't know you could do that via the entry point!

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

the flag was initially added 11 years ago to let linter plugins not fall apart in certain usages - its safe to assume it as unused in normal testing

[imedkablavi]

wouldn't try to make conftest.py itself enforce this, because --noconftest exists specifically to skip conftest discovery.

For an accidental-safety guard, I'd move the check into a small pytest plugin installed with the test environment and register it through the pytest11 entry point. Then run the environment check from pytest_configure or pytest_sessionstart.

--noconftest won't prevent an installed plugin from loading, so it covers the case you're worried about without adding an autouse fixture to every module.

Something along these lines:

myproject_pytest_guard/plugin.py

import pytest

def pytest_sessionstart(session):
if not environment_is_safe():
pytest.exit("Refusing to run tests in this environment")

and register it in pyproject.toml:

[project.entry-points.pytest11]
project-safety = "myproject_pytest_guard.plugin"

I still wouldn't treat this as a security boundary: a developer can intentionally disable plugins too. For mounts/production resources, the real protection should stay outside pytest (permissions, container isolation, credentials, CI policy, etc.). But as a defense against accidentally running the suite in the wrong environment, an installed plugin is a much better fit than conftest.py