Is there a gui for nosetests

Question

I've been using nosetests for the last few months to run my Python unit tests.

It definitely does the job but it is not great for giving a visual view of what tests are working or breaking.

I've used several other GUI based unit test frameworks that provide a visual snap shot of the state of your unit tests as well as providing drill down features to get to detailed error messages.

Nosetests dumps most of its information to the console leaving it the developer to sift through the detail.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I like to open a second terminal, next to my editor, in which I just run a loop which re-runs nosetests (or any test command, e.g. plain old unittests) every time any file changes. Then you can keep focus in your editor window, while seeing test output update every time you hit 'save' in your editor.

I'm not sure what the OP means by 'drill down', but personally all I need from the test output is the failure traceback, which of course is displayed whenever a test fails.

This is especially effective when your code and tests are well-written, so that the vast majority of your tests only take milliseconds to run. I might run these fast unit tests in a loop as described above while I edit or debug, and then run any longer-running tests manually at the end, just before I commit.

You can re run tests manually using Bash 'watch' (but this just runs them every X seconds. Which is fine, but it isn't quite snappy enough to keep me happy.)

Alternatively I wrote a quick python package 'rerun', which polls for filesystem changes and then reruns the command you give it. Polling for changes isn't ideal, but it was easy to write, is completely cross-platform, is fairly snappy if you tell it to poll every 0.25 seconds, doesn't cause me any noticeable lag or system load even with large projects (e.g. Python source tree), and works even in complicated cases (see below.) https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rerun/

A third alternative is to use a more general-purpose 'wait on filesystem changes' program like 'watchdog', but this seemed heavyweight for my needs, and solutions like this which listen for filesystem events sometimes don't work as I expected (e.g. if Vim saves a file by saving a tmp somewhere else and then moving it into place, the events that happen sometimes aren't the ones you expect.) Hence 'rerun'.

Answer 2

You can use rednose plugin to color up your console. The visual feedback is much better with it.

Answer 3

I've used Trac + Bitten for continuous integration, it was fairly complex setup and required substantial amount of time to RTFM, set up and then maintain everything but I could get nice visual reports with failed tests and error messages and graphs for failed tests, pylint problems and code coverage over time.

Bitten is a continuous integration plugin for Trac. It has the master-slave architecture. Bitten master is integrated with and runs together with Trac. Bitten slave can be run on any system that communicate with master. It would regularly poll master for build tasks. If there is a pending task (somebody has commited something recently), master will send "build recipe" similar to ant's build.xml to slave, slave would follow the recipe and send back results. Recipe can contain instructions like "check out code from that repository", "execute this shell script", "run nosetests in this directory". The build reports and statistics then show up in Trac.

Answer 4

I know this question was asked 3 years ago, but I'm currently developing a GUI to make nosetests a little easier to work with on a project I'm involved in.

Our project uses PyQt which made it really simple to start with this GUI as it provides all you need to create interfaces. I've not been working with Python for long but its fairly easy to get to grips with so if you know what you're doing it'll be perfect providing you have the time.

You can convert .UI files created in the PyQt Designer to python scripts with:

pyuic4 -x interface.ui -o interface.py

And you can get a few good tutorials to get a feel for PyQt here. Hope that helps someone :)