List all Tests Found by Nosetest

Question

I use nosetests to run my unittests and it works well. I want to get a list of all the tests nostests finds without actually running them. Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

There will be soon: a new --collect switch that produces this behavior was demo'd at PyCon last week. It should be on the trunk "soon" and will be in the 0.11 release.

The http://groups.google.com/group/nose-users list is a great resource for nose questions.

Answer 2

Version 0.11.1 is currently available. You can get a list of tests without running them as follows:

nosetests -v --collect-only

Answer 3

I recommend using:

nosetests -vv --collect-only

While the -vv option is not described in man nosetests, "An Extended Introduction to the nose Unit Testing Framework" states that:

Using the -vv flag gives you verbose output from nose's test discovery algorithm. This will tell you whether or not nose is even looking in the right place(s) to find your tests.

The -vv option can save time when trying to determine why nosetests is only finding some of your tests. (In my case, it was because nosetests skipped certain tests because the .py scripts were executable.)

Bottom line is that the -vv option is incredibly handy, and I almost always use it instead of the -v option.