[Tutor] Best way to setup Unit Testing?

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com>
> To: Srinivas Nyayapati <shireenrao at gmail.com>
> Cc: tutor at python.org
> Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2013 12:47 PM
> Subject: Re: [Tutor] Best way to setup Unit Testing?
> 
> On 7 July 2013 21:16, Srinivas Nyayapati <shireenrao at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am tryng to figure out the best way to do Unit Testing for all my 
> projects
>> going forward.
> 
> Are you the only one using these applications or are you intending
> that other people would install them? Do you want other people to run
> the tests on their machines when they install?
 
Shouldn't this always be possible?
 
>Will other people also
> work on the development of these projects and will they also need to
> run the tests?
> 
>> I am using the unittest framework. For execution I am
>> executing the test cases by either directly using python or by using the
>> nose test runner. I found the following 3 types of how this can be setup.
>> 
>> Type 1
>> ======
>> 
>> The unit tests are located in the same package as the module being tested.
>> This is the easiest to implement and run. I don't have to do anything
>> special to run the tests. The directory structure is like this
>> 
>> Projects/
>>     MyApp/
>>         __init__.py
>>         myapp.py
>>         test_myapp.py
> 
> The (possible) advantage of this setup is that a user can run tests on
> the application while it is installed using:
> 
> $ python -m MyApp.test_myapp
> 
> The above could get messy if the number of submodules increases though.
> 
>> 
>> Simply run the test from within the MyApp folder as
>> 
>> % python test_myapp.py
>> or use the nose test runner
>> 
>> % nosetests
>> 
>> Type 2
>> ======
>> 
>> Here the unit tests are located in its own tests folder in the package you
>> want to test. Running the unit tests from inside the tests folder won't 
> work
>> as it worked in Type 1. That's because the myapp module can not be 
> resolved.
>> Here is how the directory structure looks like
>> 
>> Projects/
>>     MyApp/
>>         __init__.py
>>         myapp.py
>>         tests/
>>             __init__.py
>>             test_myapp.py
> 
> This gives a nice clean distinction between your main code and your
> tests. It is also useful if you don't want to install the tests on the
> target machines since you can just exclude the tests package in your
> setup.py when creating an sdist.
> 
> If you do include the tests and add a __main__.py in the tests folder
> then users can still run tests with

Nice, I didn't know this one! I found this useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4042905/what-is-main-py
 
> python -m MyApp.tests
> 
>> It will work if you ran it from inside the package folder and gave the
>> complete path to the test file as
>> 
>> % python tests/test_myapp.py
>> It will also work if you used the nose test runner from inside MyApp.
>> 
>> % nosetests
>> It will also work from inside the tests folder if you added MyApp to your
>> PYTHONPATH, but that is an option I dont like. I don't want to keep 
> changing
>> my PYTHONPATH.
> 
> You can always just do that in a script. I would normally have a
> Makefile and invoke tests with
> 
> $ make test

 
Isn't this specific for unix-like systems?
 
<snip>