What to do when a py.test hangs silently?

I ran into the same SQLite/Postgres problem with Flask and SQLAlchemy, similar to Gordon Fierce. However, my solution was different. Postgres is strict about table locks and connections, so explicitly closing the session connection on teardown solved the problem for me.

My working code:

@pytest.yield_fixture(scope="function")
def db(app):
    # app is an instance of a flask app, _db a SQLAlchemy DB
    _db.app = app
    with app.app_context():
        _db.create_all()

    yield _db

    # Explicitly close DB connection
    _db.session.close()

    _db.drop_all()

Reference: SQLAlchemy