`python -m unittest discover` does not discover tests

python unit-testing nose unittest2
blokeley picture blokeley · Feb 23, 2011 · Viewed 23.9k times · Source

Python's unittest discover does not find my tests!

I have been using nose to discover my unit tests and it is working fine. From the top level of my project, if I run nosetests I get:

Ran 31 tests in 0.390s

Now that Python 2.7 unittest has discovery, I have tried using

python -m unittest discover

but I get

Ran 0 tests in 0.000s

My directory structure is:

myproj/
    reporter/
    __init__.py
    report.py
    [other app modules]
        tests/
        __init__.py
        test-report.py
        [other test modules]

Do you have any ideas why unittest's discovery algorithm can't find the tests?

I'm using Python 2.7.1 and nose 1.0.0 on Windows 7.

Answer

ncoghlan picture ncoghlan · Feb 23, 2011

The behaviour is intentional, but the documentation could make this clearer. If you look at the first paragraph in the test discovery section, it says:

For a project’s tests to be compatible with test discovery they must all be importable from the top level directory of the project (in other words, they must all be in Python packages).

A corollary to that is that the file names must also be valid Python module names. test-report.py fails that test, since test-report is not a legal Python identifier.

A docs bug suggesting that this be mentioned explicitly in the documentation for the -p pattern option would probably be a good way forward.

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