unittest2 0.1.6

The new features in unittest for Python 2.7 backported to Python 2.4+.

unittest2 is a backport of the new features added to the unittest testing framework in Python 2.7. It is tested to run on Python 2.4 - 2.6.

To use unittest2 instead of unittest simply replace import unittest with import unittest2.

Classes in unittest2 derive from the equivalent classes in unittest, so it should be possible to use the unittest2 test running infrastructure without having to switch all your tests to using unittest2 immediately. Similarly you can use the new assert methods on unittest2.TestCase with the standard unittest test running infrastructure. Not all of the new features in unittest2 will work with the standard unittest test loaders and runners however.

New features include:

• addCleanups - better resource management

• many new assert methods including better defaults for comparing lists, sets, dicts unicode strings etc and the ability to specify new default methods for comparing specific types

• assertRaises as context manager, with access to the exception afterwards

• test discovery and new command line options

• test skipping and expected failures

• load_tests protocol for loading tests from modules or packages

• startTestRun and stopTestRun methods on TestResult

• various other API improvements and fixes

Note

Command line usage

In Python 2.7 you invoke the unittest command line features (including test discover) with python -m unittest <args>. As unittest is a package, and the ability to invoke packages with python -m ... is new in Python 2.7, we can’t do this for unittest2.

Instead unittest2 comes with a script unit2. Command line usage:

unit2 discover
unit2 -v test_module

There is also a copy of this script called unit2.py, useful for Windows which uses file-extensions rather than shebang lines to determine what program to execute files with. Both of these scripts are installed by distutils.

Until I write proper documentation, the best information on all the new features is the development version of the Python documentation for Python 2.7:

• http://docs.python.org/dev/library/unittest.html

There is some information about the new features in New and improved: new features in unittest.

Look for notes about features added or changed in Python 2.7.

unittest2 is maintained in a mercurial repository. The issue tracker is on google code:

• unittest2 hg

• unittest2 issue tracker

Differences

Differences between unittest2 and unittest in Python 2.7:

assertSameElements does not silence Py3k warnings as this uses warnings.catch_warnings() which is new in Python 2.6 (and is used as a context manager which would be a pain to make work with Python 2.4).

The underlying dictionary storing the type equality functions on TestCase is a custom object rather than a real dictionary. This allows TestCase instances to be deep-copyable on Python versions prior to 2.7.

TestCase.longMessage defaults to True because it is better. It defaults to False in Python 2.7 for backwards compatibility reasons.

python -m package doesn’t work until Python 2.7, to provide the command line features a unit2 (and unit2.py) script is provided instead.

CHANGELOG

0.1.6

Fix for compatibility with old TestResult objects. New tests can now be run with nosetests (with a DeprecationWarning for TestResult objects without methods to support skipping etc).

0.1

Initial release.