nose tests of Pylons app with models in init_model?

Question

I have a stock Pylons app created using paster create -t pylons with one controller and matched functional test, added using paster controller, and a SQLAlchemy table and mapped ORM class. The SQLAlchemy stuff is defined in the init_model() function rather than in module scope (and needs to be there).

Running python setup.py test raises an exception because nose is somehow causing init_model() to be called twice within the same process, so it's trying to create a model that already exists.

I can hackishly fix this by setting and checking a global variable inside init_model(), but (a) I'd rather not, and (b) third-party libraries such as AuthKit that dynamically define models break the tests as well, and can't be so easily changed.

Is there a way to fix nose tests for Pylons, or should I write my own test script and just use unittest, loadapp, and webtest directly? Any working examples of this?

Answer 1

I would try debugging your nosetest run. Why not put:

import pdb;pdb.set_trace()

in the init_model() function and see how it is getting invoked more than once.

With PDB running you can see the stack trace using the where command:

w(here)
Print a stack trace, with the most recent frame at the bottom.
An arrow indicates the "current frame", which determines the
context of most commands.  'bt' is an alias for this command.