Karva (0.0.1-alpha.5)

A Python test framework, written in Rust.

We'd love for you to try Karva! It's currently in alpha, and your feedback helps shape the project. Get started or join us on Discord.

About Karva

Karva aims to be an efficient alternative to pytest and unittest.

Karva is intentionally narrower in scope than pytest. Not every pytest feature encourages high quality tests, and we'd rather omit features than ship ones that quietly make test suites worse. Karva draws on the Rust testing ecosystem, where projects like uv and ruff show what a disciplined test suite can look like. By keeping the surface area small, we hope to nudge Python testing in the same direction.

nextest is the clearest example of what we're aiming for, and meeting the bar it sets is an explicit goal of this project.

Getting started

Installation

Karva is available as karva on PyPI.

Use karva directly with uvx:

uvx karva test
uvx karva version

Or install karva with uv, or pip:

# With uv.
uv tool install karva@latest

# Add karva to your project.
uv add --dev karva

# With pip.
pip install karva

Usage

By default, Karva will respect your .gitignore files when discovering tests in specified directories.

To run your tests, try any of the following:

# Run all tests.
karva test

# Run tests in a specific directory.
karva test tests/

# Run tests in a specific file.
karva test tests/test_example.py

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

You can also join us on Discord