unittest colored output

Question

I use unittest (actually unittest2) for Python testing, together with Python Mock for mocking objects and nose to run all tests in a single pass.

I miss being able to tell what is working and what's wrong at a glance from the green/red bars. Is there a way to get colored output from unittest?

(Changing test suite at this point is not an option, and I actually like unittest)

Answer 1

Using a method very similar to robert's answer, I have (today!) released a package that enables colour output in unittest test results. I have called it colour-runner.

To install it, run:

pip install colour-runner

Then, where you were using unittest.TextTestRunner, use colour_runner.runner.ColourTextTestRunner instead.

See how it looks with verbosity=1...and verbosity=2

Answer 2

I'm having good success with nosetests and rednose. It's still maintained at the time of writing this.

Answer 3

In python 2.x you could try pyrg. Does not work in Python 3 though.

Answer 4

Make a class that inherits from unittest.TestResult (say, MyResults) and implements a bunch of methods. Then make a class that inherits from unittest.TextTestRunner (say, MyRunner) and override _makeResult() to return an instance of MyResults.

Then, construct a test suite (which you've probably already got working), and call MyRunner().run(suite).

You can put whatever behavior you like, including colors, into MyResults.

Answer 5

If you are running pytest this way:

python -m unittest test_my.py

Change it to:

pytest test_my.py

And you get colors for free

Answer 6

pytest can do this with no changes needed for unit tests.

Now install pytest.

pip install --user pytest

And run the tests to see the color!

Answer 7

If you could change just the line of your test imports, you could use redgreenunittest. It's a clone I made of unittest, but it has colorized output.

If you want to use it without updating any of the meat of your code, you can just use it like so:

import redgreenunittest as unittest

It's not a clone of unittest2, so it wouldn't work out-of-the-box with Andrea's code, but its source is right there, so a unittest2 fork of redgreenunittest wouldn't be out of the question.

Also, any "you're doing it wrong" comments are welcome, so long as they contain some reasoning. I'd love to do it right instead.