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Django's Nasal Passage

Summary

Django's testrunner gets you started quickly, but you soon hit your head on its limitations as your project grows. By trading it for nose, a testing framework popular in the wider Python community, we can reduce boilerplate, boost performance, and improve testing UI, with only a few lines of setting changes. Re-use your test DBs, integrate with Jenkins, split your suite into pieces, and more.

Description

  • Why nose?
    • Pain points with standard Django testing
    • Extensibility without writing custom, uncombineable testrunner subclasses
    • Rich ecosystem of helpful plugins
  • django-nose
    • Testing just your apps, not all the random installed stuff
    • Test-selection tricks: running just failed tests, running a module, etc.
    • Killing the boilerplate:
    • No more imports into init
    • No more class name collisions and accidental shadowing
    • With all this freedom, how best should you organize your tests?
    • Going 4 times faster with fixture bundling
    • Troubleshooting
    • Fixtures are evil
    • Where do I put the factories?
    • Speeding startup with test DB reuse
    • Writing faster TransactionTestCases with hygienic base classes
    • Background on Django's handling of TransactionTestCases
    • How to improve matters
    • Test-only models: what's the best practice?
  • nose-progressive
    • Dots considered harmful. When will my tests be done?
    • Patience is for the dead. Show me my tracebacks as they happen!
    • My terminal is only this big. Don't waste my space.
    • Hiding pointless stack frames
    • Editor round-tripping for quick debugging
  • Splitting into sub-suites
    • An introduction to the attr plugin
    • Have some run only on CI machines, some constantly, others before checkin
    • Choosing tests with regexes
  • Other fun plugins
    • f7u12, for when your tests get angry
    • Coverage
    • xunit, for your continual integration pleasure
    • Profiling

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