Run all my doctests for all python modules in a folder without seeing failures because of bad imports

Question

I've started integrating doctests into my modules. (Hooray!) These tend to be files which started as scripts, and are now are a few functions with CLI apps in the __name__=='__main__', so I don't want to put the running of the tests there. I tried nosetests --with-doctest, but get lots of failures I don't want to see, because some of these modules require importing things I don't have installed on this system, or should be run within special python installations in where wrappers to an open application are exposed. Is there a way I can run just all of my doctests?

I've considered a hotkey in vim to run "import doctest; doctest.testfile(currentFilename)" to run my doctests in the current module, and another script that runs all the tests - what do other doctest users do? Or should I be using something other than doctest?

Answer 1

I think nose is the way. You should either exclude the problematic modules explicitly with -e or catch the missing imports in your code with constructs like this:

try:
    import simplejson as json
except ImportError:
    import json

Update:

Another option is to provide mock replacements for the missing modules. Let's say your code has something like this:

import myfunkymodule

and you're trying run your tests in a system where myfunkymodule is missing. You could create a mock_modules/myfunkymodule.py file with mock implementations of the stuff you need from it (perhaps using MiniMock, which I highly recommend if you are using doctest). You could then run nose like this:

$ PYTHONPATH=path_to/mock_modules nosetests --with-doctest