Testing python command line apps -- Running from within the projects w/o installing

[Tim Chase]

On 2013-10-31 22:12, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:
> My usual practise is to have two entry points to the program as
> executable scripts. 

When I create stand-alone command-line scripts that take arguments,
usually they're akin to version-control tools, so I have the form

  scriptname.py [--global-opts] <command> [--command-opts] [args]

so I just make one of my <command>s allow for "test".  That way, I
can execute my tests as easily as my program.  If I've added config
parsing and script behavior depends on them, I might even create a
test harness that does something like

  #!/bin/sh
  for f in one.ini two.ini three.ini
  do
    scriptname.py --config="$f" test
  done

That way, if some of my tests take a long time to run, I can even
make sub-commands to test a subset of the functionality to speed it
up:

  scriptname.py test web-ui
  scriptname.py test database
  ...

-tkc