Why do I get the error "Invalid command nosetests" when I run nosetests from my virtualenv?

Question

I first noticed the problem with this project when I loaded it into Jenkins. More puzzlingly, I've been able to reproduce it as follows:

In original version of the project, the following command runs tests as expected:

.venv/bin/python setup.py nosetests

I then do the following:

1. Clone project: hg clone my-project my-project-clone
2. Create virtualenv .venv in clone
3. Install requirements from cloned pip freeze file

If I then run .venv/bin/python setup.py nosetests on this version and I get the following result:

setup.py: error: Invalid command nosetests

setup.py includes the following settings:

setup_requires=[
    'nose>=1.0', 'nosexcover', 'coverage', 'selenium', 'fixture'
],
test_suite='nose.collector',

I'm especially baffled because it's the same setup.py and setup.cfg files in each version and, as far as I been able to discern, the environments are identical.

Addendum

I noticed this Stack Overflow question in the sidebar, which looks closely related, but none of the solutions offered there are working in my case.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem and managed to fix it by putting

setup_requires=['nose>=1.0']

Into my setup.py file. After that the Python setup.py nosetests option was available to me.

Some links that were helpful:

• https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/setuptools_integration.html
• https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/commands.html