Mocking chained methods of datetime objects in Python

This is the 4th time in a row that I've wasted time figuring out how to mock out a function during testing that calls the chained methods of a datetime.datetime object in the function body. So I thought I'd document it here. Consider this function:

How'd you test it? Mocking out datetime.datetime is tricky because of its immutable nature. Third-party libraries like freezegun make it easier to mock and test functions like the one above. However, it's not too difficult to cover this simple case without any additional dependencies. Here's one way to achieve the goal:

Here, the mock_datetime fixture function makes the output of the chained calls on the datetime object deterministic. Then I used it in the test_get_utcnow_isoformat function to get a frozen output every time the function get_utcnow_isoformat gets called. If you run the above snippet with Python, it'll pass.

Further reading

• Python test using mock with datetime.utcnow - Stackoverflow