How to run unittest discover from "python setup.py test"?

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to get python setup.py test to run the equivalent of python -m unittest discover. I don't want to use a run_tests.py script and I don't want to use any external test tools (like nose or py.test). It's OK if the solution only works on python 2.7.

In setup.py, I think I need to add something to the test_suite and/or test_loader fields in config, but I can't seem to find a combination that works correctly:

config = {     'name': name,     'version': version,     'url': url,     'test_suite': '???',     'test_loader': '???', } 

Is this possible using only unittest built into python 2.7?

FYI, my project structure looks like this:

project/   package/     __init__.py     module.py   tests/     __init__.py     test_module.py   run_tests.py <- I want to delete this   setup.py 

Update: This is possible with unittest2 but I want find something equivalent using only unittest

From https://pypi.python.org/pypi/unittest2

unittest2 includes a very basic setuptools compatible test collector. Specify test_suite = 'unittest2.collector' in your setup.py. This starts test discovery with the default parameters from the directory containing setup.py, so it is perhaps most useful as an example (see unittest2/collector.py).

For now, I'm just using a script called run_tests.py, but I'm hoping I can get rid of this by moving to a solution that only uses python setup.py test.

Here's the run_tests.py I'm hoping to remove:

import unittest  if __name__ == '__main__':      # use the default shared TestLoader instance     test_loader = unittest.defaultTestLoader      # use the basic test runner that outputs to sys.stderr     test_runner = unittest.TextTestRunner()      # automatically discover all tests in the current dir of the form test*.py     # NOTE: only works for python 2.7 and later     test_suite = test_loader.discover('.')      # run the test suite     test_runner.run(test_suite) 

Answer 1

If you use py27+ or py32+, the solution is pretty simple:

test_suite="tests", 

Answer 2

From Building and Distributing Packages with Setuptools (emphasis mine):

test_suite

A string naming a unittest.TestCase subclass (or a package or module containing one or more of them, or a method of such a subclass), or naming a function that can be called with no arguments and returns a unittest.TestSuite.

Hence, in setup.py you would add a function that returns a TestSuite:

import unittest def my_test_suite():     test_loader = unittest.TestLoader()     test_suite = test_loader.discover('tests', pattern='test_*.py')     return test_suite 

Then, you would specify the command setup as follows:

setup(     ...     test_suite='setup.my_test_suite',     ... )