How to automatically run tests when there's any change in my project (Django)?

Question

At the moment I am running python manage.py test every once in a while after I make significant changes in my django project. Is it possible to run those tests automatically whenever I change and save a file in my project? It'll be useful to detect bugs earlier (I know rails has something like this with rspec). I am using nose and django-nose. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use entr:

1. $ brew install entr
2. $ find . -name '*.py' | entr python ./manage.py test

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Or, for extra credit, combine it with ack:

$ ack --python | entr python ./manage.py test

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If you want it to even find new files as you add them:

$ until ack -f --python | entr -d python ./manage.py test; do sleep 1; done

Answer 2

py.test answer (which also works for nose):

pip install pytest-xdist
py.test -f # will watch all subfolders for changes, and rerun the tests

Since py.test understands nose, this works for nose too.

Answer 3

I'm a JavaScript developer so I used the tools JS developer have built with Node.js to achieve the same goal in my projects. It is very simple but you also need to install nodeJS to get it working.

I created a file called gruntfile.js in my project root directory:

//gruntfile.js
module.exports = function(grunt) {

  grunt.initConfig({
    watch: {
      files: ['*.py'],
      tasks: ['shell']
    },
    shell: {
      test: {
        command: 'python main_test.py'
      }
    }
  });

  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell');

  grunt.registerTask('default', ['watch']);
};

What it's doing is basically watching any file in that directory that has a py extension and if they changed it execute a shell command which in this case is my python test (you might wanna change it, my test name was main_test.py). In order to run this grunt script you need to install Node.js and after that you will have npm in your global path. after that you need to insall a few node modules as well. All these modules except grunt-cli will be stored in your current folder so make sure you are at the root of your project or what ever folder you put that gruntfile.js in. then run the fallowing commands.

npm install grunt-cli -g
npm install grunt
npm install grunt-contrib-watch
npm install grunt-shell

Don't worry about the size, these are very small modules. Now that you have every thing setup you can simply run grunt and it will start watching your py files and when you saved them it will run your tests. It may not be best way for running python tests but as I said I'm a JavaScript developer and I think Grunt has provided a very simple way of executing tests even for other languages so I use it.