Test your LLM outputs against examples - no more manual checking! A (minimalistic) pytest plugin that helps you to evaluate that your LLM is giving good answers.
🧐 Why pytest-evals?
Building LLM applications is exciting, but how do you know they're actually working well? pytest-evals helps you:
- 🎯 Test & Evaluate: Run your LLM prompt against many cases
- 📈 Track & Measure: Collect metrics and analyze the overall performance
- 🔄 Integrate Easily: Works with pytest, Jupyter notebooks, and CI/CD pipelines
- ✨ Scale Up: Run tests in parallel with
pytest-xdistand asynchronously withpytest-asyncio.
🚀 Getting Started
To get started, install pytest-evals and write your tests:
⚡️ Quick Example
For example, say you're building a support ticket classifier. You want to test cases like:
| Input Text | Expected Classification |
|---|---|
| My login isn't working and I need to access my account | account_access |
| Can I get a refund for my last order? | billing |
| How do I change my notification settings? | settings |
pytest-evals helps you automatically test how your LLM perform against these cases, track accuracy, and ensure it
keeps working as expected over time.
# Predict the LLM performance for each case @pytest.mark.eval(name="my_classifier") @pytest.mark.parametrize("case", TEST_DATA) def test_classifier(case: dict, eval_bag, classifier): # Run predictions and store results eval_bag.prediction = classifier(case["Input Text"]) eval_bag.expected = case["Expected Classification"] eval_bag.accuracy = eval_bag.prediction == eval_bag.expected # Now let's see how our app performing across all cases... @pytest.mark.eval_analysis(name="my_classifier") def test_analysis(eval_results): accuracy = sum([result.accuracy for result in eval_results]) / len(eval_results) print(f"Accuracy: {accuracy:.2%}") assert accuracy >= 0.7 # Ensure our performance is not degrading 🫢
Then, run your evaluation tests:
# Run test cases pytest --run-eval # Analyze results pytest --run-eval-analysis
😵💫 Why Another Eval Tool?
Evaluations are just tests. No need for complex frameworks or DSLs. pytest-evals is minimalistic by design:
- Use
pytest- the tool you already know - Keep tests and evaluations together
- Focus on logic, not infrastructure
It just collects your results and lets you analyze them as a whole. Nothing more, nothing less.
📚 User Guide
Check out our detailed guides and examples:
🤔 How It Works
Built on top of pytest-harvest, pytest-evals splits evaluation into
two phases:
- Evaluation Phase: Run all test cases, collecting results and metrics in
eval_bag. The results are saved in a temporary file to allow the analysis phase to access them. - Analysis Phase: Process all results at once through
eval_resultsto calculate final metrics
This split allows you to:
- Run evaluations in parallel (since the analysis test MUST run after all cases are done, we must run them separately)
- Make pass/fail decisions on the overall evaluation results instead of individual test failures (by passing the
--supress-failed-exit-code --run-evalflags) - Collect comprehensive metrics
Note: When running evaluation tests, the rest of your test suite will not run. This is by design to keep the results clean and focused.
💾 Saving case results
By default, pytest-evals saves the results of each case in a json file to allow the analysis phase to access them.
However, this might not be a friendly format for deeper analysis. To save the results in a more friendly format, as a
CSV file, use the --save-evals-csv flag:
pytest --run-eval --save-evals-csv
📝 Working with a notebook
It's also possible to run evaluations from a notebook. To do that, simply install ipytest, and load the extension:
Then, use the magic commands %%ipytest_eval in your cell to run evaluations. This will run the evaluation phase and
then the analysis phase. By default, using this magic will run both --run-eval and --run-eval-analysis, but you can
specify your own flags by passing arguments right after the magic command (e.g., %%ipytest_eval --run-eval).
%%ipytest_eval import pytest @pytest.mark.eval(name="my_eval") def test_agent(eval_bag): eval_bag.prediction = agent.run(case["input"]) @pytest.mark.eval_analysis(name="my_eval") def test_analysis(eval_results): print(f"F1 Score: {calculate_f1(eval_results):.2%}")
You can see an example of this in the example/example_notebook.ipynb notebook. Or
look at the advanced example for a more complex example that tracks multiple
experiments.
🏗️ Production Use
📚 Managing Test Data (Evaluation Set)
It's recommended to use a CSV file to store test data. This makes it easier to manage large datasets and allows you to communicate with non-technical stakeholders.
To do this, you can use pandas to read the CSV file and pass the test cases as parameters to your tests using
@pytest.mark.parametrize 🙃 :
import pandas as pd import pytest test_data = pd.read_csv("tests/testdata.csv") @pytest.mark.eval(name="my_eval") @pytest.mark.parametrize("case", test_data.to_dict(orient="records")) def test_agent(case, eval_bag, agent): eval_bag.prediction = agent.run(case["input"])
In case you need to select a subset of the test data (e.g., a golden set), you can simply define an environment variable
to indicate that, and filter the data with pandas.
🔀 CI Integration
Run tests and analysis as separate steps:
evaluate: steps: - run: pytest --run-eval -n auto --supress-failed-exit-code # Run cases in parallel - run: pytest --run-eval-analysis # Analyze results
Use --supress-failed-exit-code with --run-eval - let the analysis phase determine success/failure. If all your
cases pass, your evaluation set is probably too small!
⚡️ Parallel Testing
As your evaluation set grows, you may want to run your test cases in parallel. To do this, install
pytest-xdist. pytest-evals will support that out of the box 🚀.
run: pytest --run-eval -n auto
👷 Contributing
Contributions make the open-source community a fantastic place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated (not only code! but also documenting, blogging, or giving us feedback) 😍.
Please fork the repo and create a pull request if you have a suggestion. You can also simply open an issue to give us some feedback.
Don't forget to give the project a star! ⭐️
For more information about contributing code to the project, read the CONTRIBUTING.md guide.
📃 License
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.