How to get django's unittest TestLoader to find and run my doctests?

Question

In Django, my tests are a set of test_foo.py files inside my_django_app/tests/, which each contain a TestCase subclass, and which django automatically finds and runs.

I have a bunch of utility modules with simple doctests that I would like to be included with my test suite. I tried using doctest.DocTestSuite() to define test suites in my_django_app/tests/test_doctests.py, but django’s test runner does not find the new tests in that module.

Is there a way I can create a TestCase class that calls my doctests, or somehow otherwise define a new tests/test_foo.py module that would run these tests?

Asked By: Taylor Hughes

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Source

Answer 1

I solved this by creating a new module, my_django_app/tests/test_doctests.py, that looks like:

import doctest
import unittest

# These are my modules that contain doctests:
from util import bitwise
from util import text
from util import urlutil
DOCTEST_MODULES = (
  bitwise,
  text,
  urlutil,
)

# unittest.TestLoader will call this when it finds this module:
def load_tests(*args, **kwargs):
  test_all_doctests = unittest.TestSuite()
  for m in DOCTEST_MODULES:
    test_all_doctests.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite(m))
  return test_all_doctests

Django uses the builtin unittest TestLoader, which, during test discovery, will call load_tests() on your test module. So we define load_tests which creates a test suite out of all of the doctests.

Answered By: Taylor Hughes

Answer 2

The automagic of Django unittests discovery looks for a load_tests function in your test_foo module and will run it. So you can use that to add your doctests to the test suite …

import doctest
import module_with_doctests

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

Also, due to a bug(?) in unittest your load_tests function won’t be run unless your test_foo module also defines a TestCase-derived class like so:

class DoNothingTest(TestCase):
    """Encourage Django unittests to run `load_tests()`."""
    def test_example(self):
        self.assertTrue(True)

Answered By: hobs

Answer 3

import django.test.runner

testsuite = django.test.runner.DiscoverRunner().build_suite()

but, as best I can tell, basic unittest discover produces the same collection

import unittest

testsuite = unittest.TestLoader().discover('.')

unrelated

I did notice that unittest and django.test appear to use an internal attribute TestCase._testMethodName differently, in unittest, this is the testcase module+class namespace, in django, this appeared to be a random testcase method name, with the module and class being attributes of self.__module__. probably try to avoid needing to poke around in internals anyway though

Answered By: ThorSummoner

How to get django's unittest TestLoader to find and run my doctests?

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