How can I have nose re-run only tests that failed?

Question

I have some Selenium Webdriver GUI tests that run on every check-in in our Trac/Bitten build environment. For various silly reasons, these are fragile and re-running the failed test always works (unless it doesn't, and then I have an actually failing test).

How do I re-run these failed tests? The GUI tests take 10-15 minutes to run, so re-running all of them is a pain.

Here is the build step:

<step id="guitest" description="Run gui tests">
    <sh:exec executable="gui_tests.sh" />
</step>

and gui_tests.sh

# Setup environment stuff deleted
nosetests python/*Tests.py -v

We are working to make the GUI tests more robust, but my understanding is that this is life with GUI tests.

Answer 1

EDIT June 2021: Surprised this is still getting votes. If at all possible, consider using ptyest with the --last-failed option.

It turns out this is trivial with nose. First run the command and include the --with-id flag.

# Environment stuff deleted
nosetests python/*Tests.py -v --with-id
nosetests python/*Tests.py -v --failed

If, say, four tests fail, running with the --failed flag will run only those four tests. If you then correct three, running with --failed will run only the remaining failed test.

Running --with-id again resets the tracking of failed tests and runs all the found tests.

I searched quite a bit for this before I wandered into writing my own plugin. When I was researching how to register my plug-in I found some code that happened to be the testid plugin provided by nose, which provides the functionality above. Sheesh. I am documenting this here, hoping to save someone else some time.

Of course, now that I know about it, it's so obviously found with:

nosetests --help

I scanned the docs initially, but didn't think it would be so easy, so I did so half-heartedly.