When Hypothesis finds a bug it stores enough information in its database to reproduce it. This enables you to have a classic testing workflow of find a bug, fix a bug, and be confident that this is actually doing the right thing because Hypothesis will start by retrying the examples that broke things last time.
The database is best thought of as a cache that you never need to invalidate: Information may be lost when you upgrade a Hypothesis version or change your test, so you shouldn't rely on it for correctness - if there's an example you want to ensure occurs each time then :ref:`there's a feature for including them in your source code <providing-explicit-examples>` - but it helps the development workflow considerably by making sure that the examples you've just found are reproduced.
The database also records examples that exercise less-used parts of your code, so the database may update even when no failing examples were found.
The design of the Hypothesis database is such that you can put arbitrary data in the database and not get wrong behaviour. When you upgrade Hypothesis, old data might be invalidated, but this should happen transparently. It can never be the case that e.g. changing the strategy that generates an argument gives you data from the old strategy.
Hypothesis' default :obj:`~hypothesis.settings.database` setting creates a
:class:`~hypothesis.database.DirectoryBasedExampleDatabase` in your current working directory,
under .hypothesis/examples. If this location is unusable, e.g. because you do not have
read or write permissions, Hypothesis will emit a warning and fall back to an
:class:`~hypothesis.database.InMemoryExampleDatabase`.
Hypothesis provides the following :class:`~hypothesis.database.ExampleDatabase` implementations:
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.database.InMemoryExampleDatabase
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.database.DirectoryBasedExampleDatabase
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.database.ReadOnlyDatabase
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.database.MultiplexedDatabase
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.extra.redis.RedisExampleDatabase
You can define your :class:`~hypothesis.database.ExampleDatabase`, for example to use a shared datastore, with just a few methods:
.. autoclass:: hypothesis.database.ExampleDatabase :members: