Running qiBuild test suite

Installing required packages

You need to install the following Python packages to run the test suite:

  • python-tox

Althought qiBuild is a cross-platform, running the test suite on Windows with Visual Studio is quite painful. (Patches welcome ...)

All in one step

Simply go to the root directory of qibuild and run:

tox -c python/tox.ini

Note: if you are on a distribution where /usr/bin/python is Python3, you should use

tox2 -c python/tox.ini

This will use pylint to find obvious errors (like variables referenced before assignement, missing imports, and so on), then will run the automatic tests, and finally run a coverage report.

Sometime pylint is mistaken, you can fix this by adding a small comment to disable the check, using the pylint error code:

# pylint: disable-msg=E1101

Running test suite

This is on a build farm but only for linux and python2.7, so it is possible that some tests will fail.

If you do find a failing test, please open a bug.

If you find a bug, a nice way to make it easier to fix it is to write a failing test and mark it as ‘skipped’

@pytest.skip("See bug # ....")
def test_subtle_bug(self):
   res = do_something_complicated()
   # Should be 42 but for some reason is 41 ...
   self.assertTrue(res, 42)

This way when the bug is fixed we just have to remove the @pytest.skip and we are sure the bug never occurs again.

Note: some tests are slow to run, you can mark them with

@pytest.mark.slow
def test_slow_command(self):
    # something long going on here ...

And then run the tests with

cd python/
py.test -k -slow

Running only some tests

You can use py.test (or py.test2) with

  • Just for a given python package:
cd python
py.test qisrc
  • Just for a given test file:
py.test qisrc/test/test_git.py
  • Just for a given test name:
py.test qisrc/test/test_git.py -k set_tracking_branch

Note about ipdb

If you are using ipdb to insert break points in the code like this:

# in foo.py
def test_my_complicated_function():
    import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

You will get an error message like this if you run

$ py.test foo.py
ValueError: fallback required, but not specified

(This may be a bug in ipdb, py.test or both ...)

The solution is to use the -s option of py.test:

$ py.test foo.py -s
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