How to specify testpaths that are sub-selected, not overridden, by paths specified on command line?

[MetRonnie]

With a project structured like this:

project
|-- foo
|    `-- bar
|        `-- <Python source code>
|-- tests
|   |-- functional
|   |   `-- <Non-python tests>
|   |-- integration
|   |   `-- <Python tests>
|   `-- unit
|       `-- <Python tests>
`-- pytest.ini

We want to only ever run tests in these 3 directories specified by testpaths:

[pytest]
addopts =
    --doctest-modules
testpaths =
    foo/bar/  # Doctests
    tests/unit/
    tests/integration/

This works fine invoking pytest without specifying any paths on the command line. But tools like the test explorer in VSCode will specify paths when invoking pytest (e.g. pytest /path/to/project or pytest .tests/), and these paths cause testpaths to be ignored. Pytest then gets ModuleNotFoundErrors and so on because it's looking in tests/functional.

Essentially I am looking for a way to constrain the paths that Pytest uses to those contained within the paths specified in pytest.ini, but testpaths does not do this.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

its a bug in the ide integration to pass in such paths by default

testpaths are the go-to for when no path is goven

any passed in path will overide them with that path

[MetRonnie]

Though it seems to me there is a use case for being able to do pytest tests/ and it only running tests/unit and tests/integration (if not using testpaths, then perhaps a new setting)?

[nicoddemus]

Alternatively you can exclude certain directories so pytest will never collect from them by using collect_ignore_glob in the root conftest.py file.