Unable to run unittest's main function in ipython/jupyter notebook

Question

I am giving an example which throws an error in ipython/jupyter notebook, but runs fine as an individual script.

import unittest

class Samples(unittest.TestCase         


        

Answer 1

unittest.main looks at sys.argv by default, which is what started IPython, hence the error about the kernel connection file not being a valid attribute. You can pass an explicit list to main to avoid looking up sys.argv.

In the notebook, you will also want to include exit=False to prevent unittest.main from trying to shutdown the kernel process:

unittest.main(argv=['first-arg-is-ignored'], exit=False)

You can pass further arguments in the argv list, e.g.

unittest.main(argv=['ignored', '-v'], exit=False)