Problems using nose in a virtualenv.

Question

I am unable to use nose (nosetests) in a virtualenv project - it can't seem to find the packages installed in the virtualenv environment.

The odd thing is that i can set

test_suite = 'nose.collector'

in setup.py and run the tests just fine as

python setup.py test

but when running nosetests straight, there are all sorts of import errors.

I've tried it with both a system-wide installation of nose and a virtualenv nose package and no luck.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Are you able to run myenv/bin/python /usr/bin/nosetests? That should run Nose using the virtual environment's library set.

Answer 2

Here's what works for me:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages env1
$ cd env1
$ source bin/activate            # makes "env1" environment active,
                                 # you will notice that the command prompt
                                 # now has the environment name in it.

(env1)$ easy_install nose        # install nose package into "env1"

I created a really basic package slither that had, in its setup.py, same test_suite attribute as you mentioned above. Then I placed the package source under env1/src.

If you looked inside env1/src, you'd see:

slither/setup.py
slither/slither/__init__.py
slither/slither/impl.py          # has some very silly code to be tested
slither/slither/tests.py         # has test-cases 

I can run the tests using test subcommand:

(env1)$ pushd src/slither
(env1)$ python setup.py test
# ... output elided ...
test_ctor (slither.tests.SnakeTests) ... ok
test_division_by_zero (slither.tests.SnakeTests) ... ok
Ran 2 tests in 0.009s
OK
(env1)$ popd

Or, I can run the same tests with nosetests:

(env1)$ pushd src
(env1)$ nosetests slither/
..
Ran 2 tests in 0.007s
OK
(env1)$ popd

Also note that nosetests can be picky about executables. You can pass --exe if you want it to discover tests in python modules that are executable.