How do you create a python package with a built in "test/main.py" main function?

Question

Desired directory tree:

Fibo
|-- src
|   `-- Fibo.py
`-- test
    `-- main.py

What I want is to call python main.py after cd'ing into test and executing main.py will run all the unit tests for this package.

Currently if I do:

import Fibo

def main():
    Fibo.fib(100)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I get an error: "ImportError: No module named Fibo".

But if I do:

import sys

def main():
    sys.path.append("/home/tsmith/svn/usefuldsp/trunk/Labs/Fibo/src")
    import Fibo
    Fibo.fib(100)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This seems to fix my error. And I could move forward... but this isn't a python package. This is more of a "collection of files" approach.

How would you setup your testing to work in this directory structure?

Answer 1

Adding /home/tsmith/svn/usefuldsp/trunk/Labs/Fibo/src to your PYTHONPATH environment variable would allow you to write

import Fibo

def main():
    Fibo.fib(100)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

and have it import .../Fibo/src/Fibo.py correctly.

Answer 2

If I want to import a module that lives at a fixed, relative location to the file I'm evaluating, I often do something like this:

try:
    import Fibo
except ImportError:
    import sys
    from os.path import join, abspath, dirname
    parentpath = abspath(join(dirname(__file__), '..'))
    srcpath = join(parentpath, 'src')
    sys.path.append(srcpath)
    import Fibo

def main():
    Fibo.fib(100)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

If you want to be a good namespace-citizen, you could del the no longer needed symbols at the end of the except block.

Answer 3

Quick and dirty way: create a symbolic link