How to access plugin options within a test? (Python Nose)

Question

We are trying to implement an automated testing framework using nose. The intent is to add a few command line options to pass into the tests, for example a hostname. We run

Answer 1

So I've found out how to make this work:

import os
from nose.plugins import Plugin

case_options = None

class test_args(Plugin):
    """
    Attempting to add command line parameters.
    """
    name = 'test_args'
    enabled = True

    def options(self, parser, env=os.environ):
        super(test_args, self).options(parser, env)
        parser.add_option("--hostname",
                    action="store",
                    type="str",
                    help="The hostname of the server")

    def configure(self, options, conf):
        global case_options 
        case_options = options

Using this you can do this in your test case to get the options:

    from test_args import case_options

To solve the different config file issues, I've found you can use a setup.cfg file written like an INI file to pass in default command line parameters. You can also pass in a -c config_file.cfg to pick a different config. This should work nicely for what we need.