Testing

In the pyblosxom git repository, there are two big things that have test suites:

1. the Pyblosxom core code
2. the plugins that are in plugins/

These have two separate testing infrastructures, but both are based on unittest which comes with Python.

Pyblosxom core code testing

These tests are located in Pyblosxom/tests/ and test the Pyblosxom core functionality and all core plugins.

Tests are executed by:

python setup.py test

This uses the test_suite parameter to setup which is in both distribute and setuptools.

The test_suite is Pyblosxom.tests.testrunner.test_suite which is a function that goes through all the files in Pyblosxom/tests/ and loads tests in files where the filename starts with test_ and ends in .py.

The Pyblosxom.tests package defines helper functions, classes, and other things to make testing easier.

Writing tests is pretty easy:

1. create a file in Pyblosxom/tests/ with a filename that starts with test_ and ends with .py.
2. import UnitTestBase from Pyblosxom.tests
3. create a subclass of UnitTestBase
4. write some tests using pretty standard unittest stuff

See Pyblosxom/tests/ for examples testing the core as well as core plugins.

Summary

That’s about it!

Writing tests is a great way to start contributing to this project and it will help you learn the code base. If you’re at all interested, let us know!

Adding tests for the code we’re writing helps us a TON in the quality department. Pyblosxom 1.5 is ten times as good as previous versions because we’ve got a better testing infrastructure and we’re testing plugin functionality.

Many thanks to Ryan Barret for the awesome work he did a while back writing tests for plugins.