🌐 External Services Tests (external)

These tests verify integrations with external APIs and data sources. They do not require the backend server to be running, but they do require an internet connection (except BRIM, which uses local sample files).

🎯 Purpose

To ensure that external providers (like Yahoo Finance, ECB, etc.) are reachable and returning data in the expected format.

🔑 Sub-commands

Sub-command	What It Tests
fx-providers	FX rate providers: ECB, FED, BOE, SNB, MANUAL
asset-providers	Asset pricing providers: yfinance, JustETF, CSS Scraper, etc.
brim-providers	Broker Report Import Manager parsers (local sample files, no network)
all	All of the above

🚀 Running

# All external tests
./dev.py test external all

# Single sub-command
./dev.py test external fx-providers
./dev.py test external asset-providers
./dev.py test external brim-providers

# Verbose output
./dev.py test -v external asset-providers

# With coverage tracking
./dev.py test --coverage external all

🔍 Provider Filtering

When an external service is down (e.g., Yahoo Finance outage), you can skip its tests without modifying code.

Exclude specific providers

# Skip yfinance tests (Yahoo Finance is down)
./dev.py test external asset-providers --exclude-providers yfinance

# Skip multiple providers
./dev.py test external all --exclude-providers yfinance broker_coinbase

Include only specific providers

# Only test JustETF
./dev.py test external asset-providers --providers justetf

# Only test ECB and FED
./dev.py test external fx-providers --providers ECB FED

Works with all and all-backend too

# Run the full test suite but exclude yfinance
./dev.py test all --exclude-providers yfinance

# Run all backend tests, only test ECB for FX
./dev.py test all-backend --providers ECB justetf

How it works

The --providers / --exclude-providers flags translate to pytest -k expressions:

Flag	Pytest equivalent
--providers yfinance justetf	-k "yfinance or justetf"
--exclude-providers yfinance	-k "not yfinance"

Dynamic help

Run ./dev.py test external -h to see all available provider codes, discovered automatically from the source tree.

Lightweight discovery

Provider codes are discovered by regex-parsing the Python source files — the modules are never imported. This avoids heavy side-effects (TTL cache creation, logger initialisation, network client setup) and keeps ./dev.py test -h instant.

🔄 yfinance Retry Logic

The Yahoo Finance provider includes automatic retry with exponential backoff for transient network errors (API instability, rate limiting, timeouts).

Parameter	Value
Max retries	3
Base delay	1.5 s (→ 1.5 s, 3 s, 6 s)
Transient keywords	curl, connection, timeout, reset, 503, 429, rate limit, etc.

Wrapped operations: get_current_value, get_history_value, search, fetch_asset_metadata.

Non-transient errors (e.g., INVALID_IDENTIFIER_TYPE) are raised immediately without retry.

Thread safety

yfinance calls run in dedicated threads (via _run_provider_in_thread() in the core), so time.sleep() blocks only that thread without affecting the asyncio event loop.