Up to this point, we have been either appending modules with a test runner, or we have typed python -m doctest <module> on the command line to exercise our tests.
In the previous chapter, we introduced the powerful library nose (refer to http://somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose for more details).
For a quick recap, nose:
- Provides us with the convenient test discovering tool
nosetests - Is pluggable, with a huge ecosystem of available plugins
- Includes a built-in plugin targeted at finding
doctestsand running them
We need to activate our virtual environment (virtualenv) and then install nose for this recipe.
- Run
nosetests –with-doctestagainst all the modules in this folder. If you notice, it prints a very short.....F.F...F, indicating that three tests have failed. - Run
nosetests –with-doctest -vto get a more verbose output. In the following screenshot, notice how the tests that failed are the same ones that failed for the previous recipes in this chapter. It is also valuable to see the<module>.<method>format with eitherokorFAIL.
- Run
nosetests –with-doctestagainst both therecipe19.pyfile as well as therecipe19module, in different combinations.
nosetests is targeted at discovering test cases and then running them. With this plugin, when it finds a docstring, it uses the doctest library to programmatically test it.
The doctest plugin is built around the assumption that doctests are not in the same package as other tests, like unittest. This means it will only run doctests found from non-test packages.
There isn't a whole lot of complexity in the nosetests tool, and...that's the idea!. In this recipe, we have seen how to use nosetests to get a hold of all the doctests we have built so far in this chapter.
Getting nosy with testing section mentioned in Chapter 2