I’ve grown to dislike Django-Nose. It’s been over three months since Django 1.8 has been released and they still don’t have a release that fully supports it. These are the advantages they currently tout:
- Testing just your apps by default, not all the standard ones that happen to be in INSTALLED_APPS
- The Django test runner has been doing this since 1.6 https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/releases/1.6/#discovery-of-tests-in-any-test-module
- Running the tests in one or more specific modules (or apps, or classes, or folders, or just running a specific test)
- They all can do this, even the old Django test runner
- Obviating the need to import all your tests into tests/__init__.py. This not only saves busy-work but also eliminates the possibility of accidentally shadowing test classes.
- The Django test runner has this since 1.6
- Taking advantage of all the useful nose plugins
- There are some cool plugins
- Fixture bundling, an optional feature which speeds up your fixture-based tests by a factor of 4
- Ok, Django doesn’t have this, but you shouldn’t be using fixtures anyways and there are other ways to make fixtures faster
- Reuse of previously created test DBs, cutting 10 seconds off startup time
- Django can do this since 1.8 https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/releases/1.8/#tests
- Hygienic TransactionTestCases, which can save you a DB flush per test
- Django has had this since 1.6 https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/testing/tools/#django.test.TransactionTestCase
- Support for various databases. Tested with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Others should work as well.
- Django has had this forever
So what if you need a certain nose plugin? Say, xunit for Jenkins or some other tooling? Well, you still have to use Nose because django-jux hasn’t been updated in 4 years.
Here’s a small script you can use that lets you use Django + Nose while skipping the problematic Django-nose:
Run it like you would Nose:
DJANGO_SETTING_MODULE=settings.test python runtests.py --with-xunit --with-cov
One choice I made is that I use Django 1.8’s --keepdb flag instead of the REUSE_DB environment variable, but you can see how to adapt it if you wanted it to feel more like Nose. Adapting the command above to reuse the database would look like:
DJANGO_SETTING_MODULE=settings.test python runtests.py --with-xunit --with-cov --keepdb