Problems using nose in a virtualenv

Question

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 can set

test_suite = 'nose.collector'

in setup.py and run the tests just fine as

python setup.py test

but when running nosetests straight, there are all sorts of import errors.

I've tried it with both a system-wide installation of nose and a virtualenv nose package and no luck.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!!

Solution 1

Are you able to run myenv/bin/python /usr/bin/nosetests? That should run Nose using the virtual environment's library set.

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

In the same situation I needed to reload the virtualenv for the path to be correctly updated:

deactivate
env/bin/activate

Solution 4

I got a similar problem. The following workaround helped:

python `which nosetests` 

(instead of just nosestests)

Solution 5

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.

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Comments

[Ryan]

On a related note, nose works fine "out of the box" on a different computer... so there's something wonky with the system I was having problems on.

[bcoughlan]

If using with scripts that other developers will use, you can do python `which nosetests`

[Ceasar Bautista]

It seems that one might have to refresh the virtualenv. Namely, which nosetests should point to an executable inside of the virtualenv.

[Tom]

+1 This is what worked for me. Also, as Ceasar points out, I also had to refresh the virtualenv by running deactivate and then reactivating.

[Necrolyte2]

Try this alias nosetests='/usr/bin/env python $(which nosetests)'

[David Gay]

After you use this command, then deactivate, then workon ENV, it seems you can then use python `which nosetests` .

[Joost]

When which nosetests does not correctly point to the venv, check if you have installed nose or nose2, and note that nose2 does not use the nosetests executable (but uses nose2 instead). D-oh!

[hansmosh]

This is the one that did it for me. Any idea why you need to re-activate after installing nose (or nose2, in my case)?

[Andrea Zonca]

@hansmosh, cannot test right now, it would be useful to check all the paths

[Steven Stip]

I had nose installed globally so the nosetests executable didn't resolve properly. the following worked: python which nosetests but this is the actual solution for me.