I am unable to use nose (nosetests) in a virtualenv project - it can\'t seem to find the packages installed in the virtualenv environment.
The odd thing is that i ca
I got a similar problem. The following workaround helped:
python `which nosetests` 
(instead of just nosestests)
You might have a nosetests that is installed somewhere else in your PATH with higher priority than the one installed in your virtualenv. A quick way to give the nose module and associated nosetests script installed in your current virtualenv top priority is to edit your PATH:
export PATH=/path/to/current/virtualenv/bin:$PATH
If all else fails, try installing nose in your venv, and/or run nosetests-2.7. I believe @andrea-zonca's answer has the same effect if your venv python is 2.7
You need to have a copy of nose installed in the virtual environment. In order to force installation of nose into the virtualenv, even though it is already installed in the global site-packages, run pip install with the -I flag:
(env1)$ pip install nose -I
From then on you can just run nosetests as usual.
Are you able to run myenv/bin/python /usr/bin/nosetests? That should run Nose using the virtual environment's library set.
Here's what works for me:
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages env1
$ cd env1
$ source bin/activate            # makes "env1" environment active,
                                 # you will notice that the command prompt
                                 # now has the environment name in it.
(env1)$ easy_install nose        # install nose package into "env1"
I created a really basic package slither that had, in its setup.py, same test_suite attribute as you mentioned above. Then I placed the package source under env1/src.
If you looked inside env1/src, you'd see:
slither/setup.py
slither/slither/__init__.py
slither/slither/impl.py          # has some very silly code to be tested
slither/slither/tests.py         # has test-cases 
I can run the tests using test subcommand:
(env1)$ pushd src/slither
(env1)$ python setup.py test
# ... output elided ...
test_ctor (slither.tests.SnakeTests) ... ok
test_division_by_zero (slither.tests.SnakeTests) ... ok
Ran 2 tests in 0.009s
OK
(env1)$ popd
Or, I can run the same tests with nosetests:
(env1)$ pushd src
(env1)$ nosetests slither/
..
Ran 2 tests in 0.007s
OK
(env1)$ popd
Also note that nosetests can be picky about executables. You can pass --exe if you want it to discover tests in python modules that are executable.