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Selecting & Ignoring

What's inside
  • 🎯 Run only the scenarios you care about
  • 🧹 Gently ignore which aren’t relevant right now
  • 🧬 Target individual tests, even parameterized cases

Introduction​

In day-to-day development, you often run just a subset of your test suite — a single scenario, a few files, or everything in just one directory. Vedro gives you multiple ways to precisely control what gets executed.

Selecting Scenarios​

To run specific files or directories, pass them to vedro run:

$ vedro run <file_or_dir>

Examples:

# Run all scenarios in a directory
$ vedro run scenarios/login/

# Run two individual files
$ vedro run scenarios/register/register_new_user.py \
            scenarios/login/login_as_registered_user.py

Ignoring Scenarios​

Use the -i or --ignore flag to exclude specific files or directories:

$ vedro run -i <file_or_dir>  # or --ignore

Example:

$ vedro run -i scenarios/logout/

Ignored scenarios are completely excluded from the run: they won’t be executed, shown in output, or counted in summary statistics. To skip a scenario (but still include it in the report), see the Skipping Scenarios guide.

Combining Selection with Ignoring​

You can combine file selection and ignore flags to run a group of scenarios while excluding specific ones:

$ vedro run scenarios/login/ \
         -i scenarios/login/try_to_login_as_nonexisting_user.py

This runs everything in scenarios/login/, except the file you explicitly ignored.

tip

Use --dry-run to preview which scenarios would be executed, without actually running them. Helpful when fine-tuning test selection.

Selecting One and Only Scenario​

To run just one scenario, add the @vedro.only decorator:

import vedro

@vedro.only
class Scenario(vedro.Scenario):
    subject = "register new user"
    ...

Then run:

$ vedro run

To guard against accidentally committing @vedro.only, enable forbid_only in CI using the Skipper plugin configuration:

Show config...
import vedro.plugins.skipper
from os import environ as env

class Config(vedro.Config):

    class Plugins(vedro.Config.Plugins):

        class Skipper(vedro.plugins.skipper.Skipper):
            enabled = True
            forbid_only = env.get("CI", False)

This will raise an error if any scenario uses @only.

Selecting by Subject​

To run scenarios by their subject line, use --subject followed by a string match:

$ vedro run --subject 'register new user'

All scenarios with a matching subject will be executed.

Selecting a Parameterized Case​

The easiest way to run a specific parameterized scenario is through an IDE like PyCharm or VS Code, which let you run individual cases directly from the UI.

If you're using the terminal, you can target a specific instance by appending #<index> to the scenario class:

import vedro
from vedro import params

class Scenario(vedro.Scenario):
    subject = "{subject}"

    @params("get ok status", 200)
    @params("get not found status", 404)
    def __init__(self, subject, status):
        self.subject = subject
        self.status = status

    ...

Run the first case (200 OK):

$ vedro run scenarios/get_status.py::Scenario#1

Run the second (404 Not Found):

$ vedro run scenarios/get_status.py::Scenario#2

Indexing starts at 1, and follows the top-to-bottom order of @params declarations — the natural order they appear in your code.

The Big Picture​

Every selection feature (whether it’s a path, subject, decorator, or parameter index) is just a filter.

Vedro starts with the full set of available scenarios and lets you narrow it down using rules:

  • vedro run <path> → filter out everything except what’s in the specified path
  • --ignore <path> → filter out only what’s in the specified path
  • --subject <intent> → filter out all scenarios that don’t match this subject
  • @vedro.only decorator → filter out everything except this scenario

Think of each tool as a way to define what to ignore, until only the scenarios you care about are left. Once you see it that way, combining filters becomes intuitive, predictable, and powerful.