testing.rst

Let There Be Tests

The funniest package needs some tests. These should be placed in a submodule of funniest. so that they can be imported, but won't pollute the global namespace.:

funniest/
    funniest/
        __init__.py
        tests/
            __init__.py
            test_joke.py
    setup.py
    ...

The test_joke.py file is our first test file. Although it's overkill for now, we'll use a unittest.TestCase subclass to provide infrastructure for later development.:

from unittest import TestCase

import funniest

class TestJoke(TestCase):
    def test_is_string(self):
        s = funniest.joke()
        self.assertTrue(isinstance(s, basestring))

The best way to get these tests going (particularly if you're not sure what to use) is Nose. With those files added, it's just a matter of running this from the root of the repository:

$ pip install nose
$ nosetests

To integrate this with our setup.py, and ensure that Nose is installed when we run the tests, we'll add a few lines to setup():

setup(
    ...
    test_suite='nose.collector',
    tests_require=['nose'],
)

Then, to run tests, we can simply do:

$ python setup.py test

Setuptools will take care of installing nose and running the test suite.