Question

I have a folder with all my unittests. They all include:

if __name__ ==  '__main__':
    unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(suite())

So to test them I only have to import the test script. I have a test_all script that does all the unittests by importing them one by one. Currently this looks like this:

from pyMS.test import test_baseFunctions
from pyMS.test import test_compareFeatureXMLmzML
from pyMS.test import test_config
from pyMS.test import test_featureFunctions
from pyMS.test import test_fileHandling
from pyMS.test import test_mzmlFunctions
from pyMS.test import test_output
from pyMS.test import test_parseFeatureXML
from pyMS.test import test_rFunctions
from pyMS.test import test_rPlots
[...]

This means that every time I add or remove a new test I need to change the imports. So instead I want to use

from pyMS.test import *

However, this does not run any of the code. I’m curious for the reason why import * does not run the code.
Also, if someone knows a solution (that is note nose) to run all unittests without having to import them one by one would be great.

Thanks
Niek

Answer 1

If you use python 2.7 you can use the command line:

python -m unittest discover

This will automatically find and execute all tests in all subdirectories. For more options, see:

python -m unittest -h

This module has been backported to python 2.3+ and can be downloaded here. If you use the backport there’s an included command line script called unit2 or unit2.py (your choice), invoked like this:

unit2.py discover

---

As for from XXX import *, this actually imports everything in the namespace of the file XXX/__init__.py. Put the following code in __init__.py to automatically load any direct submodules:

import os

all_files = os.listdir(os.path.dirname(__file__))
modules = [x for x in all_files if x.endswith(".py") and not x.startswith("_")]
__all__ = [x.rpartition(".")[0] for x in modules]

A detailed explanation of how this works can be found in the python docs for the __all__ global variable.