Error in loading plugin in unit tests: "expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not NoneType"

[felixfontein]

@emx

We don’t have a “collection” for our plugin - it’s just in the lookup_plugins directory under the playbook directory, and I really don’t want to make any major changes to this just to fix one little unit test.

ansible-test is for collections (and ansible-core), so if you don’t have one, you cannot use it.

I would really suggest to move your plugin into a collection (you can have a local collection foo.bar local to your playbooks in a collections/ansible_collections/foo/bar subdirectory, you don’t need to keep it in a separate repository or even build and publish it).

@emx

So now I have a stack trace. This error happens because

sys.modules.get('ansible_collections.community.general.plugins.lookup').__file__ is None

Adding an empty __init__.py file to the directory returned by .__path__ for that module (“~/.direnv/python-3.12.1/lib/python3.12/site-packages/ansible_collections/community/general/plugins/lookup” in my case) works around the problem and the unit test runs.

That’s because you are not using ansible-core’s Python module (as in: Python module, not Ansible module) loader, which doesn’t need the __init__.py files to be present, but you’re (implicitly) using the plain Python module loader. I guess for older versions that one was added magically when using the plugin loader, but now it isn’t.

You should probably run init_plugin_loader() from ansible.plugins.loader before using the loader, that seems to initialize everything:

from ansible.plugins.loader import lookup_loader, init_plugin_loader
init_plugin_loader()
dig_module = lookup_loader.get("community.general.dig")