[Distutils] testing with eggs

[Ian Bicking]

Just thought I'd pass this along, since it took me a little while to 
figure it out.  Maybe this can go in docs somewhere, but I'm not sure where.

So, I'm writing some code that uses egg plugins, and thus I need testing 
eggs.  These need to be path-independent (since the checkouts might live 
anywhere), with no setup commands (you shouldn't have to install the 
testing version of the eggs to run the tests), and the eggs should be 
available only when you are running the tests (no global installation).

I'm using py.test, so I add a conftest.py file which is loaded before 
any tests are imported.  It's important all this is done before 
pkg_resources is imported (maybe there are methods in pkg_resources that 
can fix things after it was imported, but pkg_resources uses sys.path 
when it is imported, so if you adjust the path later then pkg_resources 
won't notice it).

Anyway, here's the code I use:


import os
import sys
import glob

here = os.path.dirname(__file__)
base = os.path.dirname(here)
fake_packages = os.path.join(here, 'fake_packages')

for egg_info_dir in glob.glob('%s/*/*.egg-info' % fake_packages):
     sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(egg_info_dir))


At first I tried adding fake_packages to sys.path; didn't work at all. 
But if I do site.addsitedir(fake_packages) then it would work.  But this 
requires an .egg-link file in fake_packages, and that file has to have 
an absolute path (it can't be relative), but fake_packages could be 
anywhere.  So in the end, I just need to add all the necessary paths; 
this means I can't test the case when --multi-version is used to install 
an egg, but I guess I won't worry about that.

If you are curious about the base setup, I've checked in a minimal file 
layout of the whole thing into 
http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/Deploy/trunk/

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org