Django doctests in views.py

Question

The Django 1.4 documentation on tests states:

For a given Django application, the test runner looks for doctests in two places:

• The

Answer 1

I posted a github gist that lets you run test in any file or module in your project. Running doctests from specific modules and files

Answer 2

This is my tests/__init__.py implementation, based on Jesse Shieh answer:

import doctest
import unittest

list_of_doctests = [
    'myapp.views.myview',
    'myapp.forms.myform',
]
list_of_unittests = [
    'sometestshere',  # This file is myapp/tests/sometestshere.py
    'moretestshere',  # This file is myapp/tests/moretestshere.py
    'myapp.tests.othertest',  # Absolute paths also work.
]

def suite():
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    for t in list_of_doctests:
        suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite(
            __import__(t, globals(), locals(), fromlist=["*"])
        ))
    for t in list_of_unittests:
        suite.addTest(unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromModule(
            __import__(t, globals(), locals(), fromlist=["*"])
        ))
    return suite

Basically, this solution allows adding arbitrary "files" (actually, modules) to the test suite. It allows splitting the unit tests into separate files, and allows adding any module that contains doctests. Just add the module names to the appropriate list at the top of this file.

Answer 3

Use nosetests with plugin for django (django-sane-testing or django-nose) and use the --with-doctest flag.

Answer 4

You can do this by adding/editing the suite() function in tests.py which defines what tests will be run by the django test runner.

import unittest
import doctest
from project import views

def suite():
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite(views))
    return suite

Then just run your tests as usual and you should see your doctests in views.py run.

$ python manage.py test project

This is described in more detail in the django testing documentation

When you run your tests, the default behavior of the test utility is to find all the test cases (that is, subclasses of unittest.TestCase) in models.py and tests.py, automatically build a test suite out of those test cases, and run that suite.

There is a second way to define the test suite for a module: if you define a function called suite() in either models.py or tests.py, the Django test runner will use that function to construct the test suite for that module. This follows the suggested organization for unit tests. See the Python documentation for more details on how to construct a complex test suite.

However, keep in mind that constructing your own test suite means that the django test runner will not automatically run any tests you have in tests.py. You'll have to add these into your suite manually, for example

import unittest
import doctest
from project import views

class FooTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def testFoo(self):
        self.assertEquals('foo', 'bar')

def suite():
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite(views))
    suite.addTest(unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(FooTestCase))
    return suite

Answer 5

Things have changed in Django 1.6:

Doctests will no longer be automatically discovered. To integrate doctests in your test suite, follow the recommendations in the Python documentation.

So all I had to do myself was (in my_app/tests.py):

import unittest
import doctest
from my_app import views

def load_tests(loader, tests, ignore):
    tests.addTests(doctest.DocTestSuite(views))
    return tests

Answer 6

Django's native testing system is based on unittest package. So it is not as powerful as it can be.

I recommend you using nose that is backward-compatible unittest on steroids. Use it along with Django test runner that uses nose. You can customize nose in many ways including pointing it to custom test locations using -m flag.