nose2pytest 1.0.5

Overview

This package provides a Python script and py.test plugin to help convert Nose-based tests into py.test-based tests. Specifically, the script transforms nose.tools.assert_* function calls into raw assert statements, while preserving format of original arguments as much as possible. For example, the script

assert_true(a, msg)
assert_greater(a, b, msg)

gets converted to

assert a, msg
assert a > b, msg

A small subset of nose.tools.assert_* function calls are not transformed because there is no raw assert statement equivalent, or the equivalent would be hard to maintain. They are provided as functions in the pytest namespace via py.test’s plugin system.

Installation

From a command shell run

pip install nose2pytest

This puts an executable file in <python-root>/Scripts with python-root being the root folder of the Python installation from which pip was run.

Running

From a command shell,

nose2pytest path/to/dir/with/python_files

This will find all .py files in the folder tree starting at path/to/dir/with/python_files and overwrite the original (assuming most users will be running this on a version-controlled code base, this is almost always what would be most convenient). Type nose2pytest -h for other options, such as -v.

Motivation

I have used Nose for years and it is a great tool. However, to get good test failure diagnostics with Nose you ought to use the assert_*() functions from nose.tools. Although they provide very good diagnostics, they are not as convenient to use as raw assertions, since you have to decide before hand what type of assertion you are going to write: an identity comparison to None, a truth check, a falseness check, an identity comparison to another object, etc. Just being able to write a raw assertion, and still get good diagnostics on failure as done by py.test, is really nice. This is a main reason for using py.test for me. Another reason is the design of fixtures in py.test.

Switching an existing test suite from Nose to py.test is feasible even without nose2pytest, as it requires relatively little work: relatively as in, you will probably only need a few modifications, all achievable manually, to get the same test coverage and results. A few gotchas:

• test classes that have __init__ will be ignored, those will have to be moved (usually, into class’s setup_class())

• the setup.cfg may have to be edited since test discovery rules are slightly more strict with py.test

• the order of tests may be different, but in general that should not matter

• all test modules are imported up-front, so some test modules may need adjustment such as moving some code from the top of the test module into its setup_module()

Once the above has been done to an existing code base, you don’t really have to do anything else. However, your test suite now has an additional third-party test dependency (Nose), just because of those assert_* functions used all over the place. Moreover, there is no longer one obvious way to do things in your test suite: existing test code uses nose.tools.assert_* functions, yet with py.test you can use raw assertions. If you add tests, which of these two approaches should a developer use? If you modify existing tests, should new assertions use raw assert? Should the remaining test method, test class, or test module be updated? A test module can contain hundreds of calls to nose.tools.assert_* functions, is a developer to manually go through each one to convert it? Painful and error prone, in general not feasible to do manually.

This is why I developed nose2pytest: I wanted to migrate my pypubsub project’s test suite from Nose to py.test, but also have only py.test as a dependency, and have one obvious way to write assertions in the test suite.

Requirements

I expect nose2pytest script to run with Python >= 3.4, to correctly convert Python test suite >= 2.7, on any OS supported by a version of python that has lib2to3 compatible with Python 3.4’s lib2to3. I expect it to succeed even with quite old versions of Nose (even prior to 1.0 which came out ca. 2010), and with the new Nose2 test driver.

Note however that I have run the script only with Python 3.4, to convert Python 3.4 test suites based on Nose 1.3.7 on Windows 7 Pro 64. If you have successfully used nose2pytest with other combinations, please kindly let me know (via github).

The pytest package namespace will be extended with assert_ functions that are not converted by the script only if, err, you have py.test installed!

Status

The package has been used on over 5000 assert_*() function calls, among which the pypubsub test suite. I consider it stable, but I have only used it on my code, and code by a few other developers. Feedback on results of conversions would be most appreciated (such as version information and number of assert statements converted).

The following conversions have been implemented:

The script adds parentheses around a and/or b if operator precedence would change the interpretation of the expression or involves newline. For example,

assert_true(some-long-expression-a in
            some-long-expression-b, msg)
assert_equal(a == b, b == c), msg

gets converted to

assert (some-long-expression-a in
            some-long-expression-b), msg
assert (a == b) == (b == c), msg

The script does not convert nose.tools.assert_ import statements as there are too many possibilities. Should from nose.tools import ... be changed to from pytest import ..., and the implemented conversions removed? Should an import pytest statement be added, and if so, where? If it is added after the line that had the nose.tools import, is the previous line really needed? Indeed the assert_ functions added in the pytest namespace could be accessed via pytest.assert_, in which case the script should prepend pytest. and remove the from nose.tools import ... entirely. Too many options, and you can fairly easily handle this via a global regexp search/replace.

Not every nose.tools.assert_* function is converted by nose2pytest:

1. Some Nose functions can be handled via a global search-replace, so a fixer was not a necessity:

   • assert_raises: replace with pytest.raises

   • assert_warns: replace with pytest.warns

2. Some Nose functions could be transformed but the readability would be decreased:

   • assert_almost_equal(a, b, places) -> assert round(abs(b-a), places) == 0

   • assert_almost_equal(a, b) -> assert round(abs(b-a), 7) == 0

   • assert_not_almost_equal(a, b, places) -> assert round(abs(b-a), places) != 0

   • assert_not_almost_equal(a, b) -> assert round(abs(b-a), 7) != 0

   • assert_dict_contains_subset(a,b) -> assert set(b.keys()) >= a.keys() and {k: b[k] for k in a if k in b} == a

   The nose2pytest distribution contains a module, assert_tools.py which defines these utility functions to contain the equivalent raw assert statement. Copy the module into your test folder or into the pytest package and change your test code’s from nose.tools import ... statements accordingly. Py.test introspection will provide error information on assertion failure.

3. Some Nose functions don’t have a one-line assert statement equivalent, they have to remain utility functions:

   • assert_raises_regex

   • assert_raises_regexp # deprecated by Nose

   • assert_regexp_matches # deprecated by Nose

   • assert_warns_regex

   These functions are available in assert_tools.py of nose2pytest distribution, and are imported as is from unittest.TestCase (but renamed as per Nose). Copy the module into your test folder or into the pytest package and change your test code’s from nose.tools import ... statements accordingly.

4. Some Nose functions simply weren’t on my radar; for example I just noticed for the first time that there is a nose.tools.ok_() function which is the same as assert_equal. Feel free to contribute via email or pull requests.

There are other limitations:

• Nose functions that can be used as context managers can obviously not be converted to raw assertions. However, there is currently no way of preventing nose2pytest from converting Nose functions used this way. You will have to manually fix.

• The lib2to3 package that nose2pytest relies on assumes python 2.7 syntax as input. The only issue that this has caused so far on code base of 20k lines of python 3.4 test code (i.e. the source code does not matter, as none of the test code, such as import statements, is actually run) are keywords like exec and print, which in Python 2.x were statements, whereas they are functions in Python 3.x. This means that in Python 3.x, a method can be named exec() or print(), whereas this would lead to a syntax error in Python 2.7. Some libraries that do not support 2.x take advantage of this (like PyQt5). Any occurrence of these two keywords as methods in your test code will cause the script to fail converting anything.

  The work around is, luckily, simple: do a global search-replace of \.exec\( for .exec__( in your test folder, run nose2pytest, then reverse the search-replace (do a global search-replace of \.exec__\( for .exec().

• @raises: this decorator can be replaced via the regular expression @raises\((.*)\) to @pytest.mark.xfail(raises=$1), but I prefer instead to convert such decorated test functions to use pytest.raises in the test function body. Indeed, it is easy to forget the decorator, and add code after the line that raises, but this code will never be run and you won’t know. Using the pytest.raises(...) is better than xfail(raise=...).

• Nose2pytest does not have a means of determining if an assertion function is inside a lambda expression, so the valid lambda: assert_func(a, b) gets converted to the invalid lambda: assert a operator b. These should be rare, are easy to spot (your IDE will flag the syntax error, or you will get an exception on import), and are easy to fix by changing from a lambda expression to a local function.

I have no doubt that more limitations will arise as nose2pytest gets used on more code bases. Contributions to address these and existing limitations are most welcome.

Other tools

If your test suite is unittest- or unittest2-based, or your Nose tests also use some unittest/2 functionatlity (such as setUp(self) method in test classes), then you might find the following useful:

• https://github.com/pytest-dev/unittest2pytest

• https://github.com/dropbox/unittest2pytest

I have used neither, so I can’t make recommendations. However, if your Nose-based test suite uses both Nose/2 and unittest/2 functionality (such as unittest.case.TestCase and/or setUp(self)/tearDown(self) methods), you should be able to run both a unittest2pytest converter, then the nose2pytest converter.

Solution Notes

I don’t think this script would have been possible without lib2to3, certainly not with the same functionality since lib2to3, due to its purpose, preserves newlines, spaces and comments. The documentation for lib2to3 is very minimal, so I was lucky to find http://python3porting.com/fixers.html.

Other than figuring out lib2to3 package so I could harness its capabilities, some aspects of code transformations still turned out to be tricky, as warned by Regobro in the last paragraph of his Extending 2to3 page.

• Multi-line arguments: Python accepts multi-line expressions when they are surrounded by parentheses, brackets or braces, but not otherwise. For example converting

  assert_func(long_a +
               long_b, msg)

  to

  assert long_a +
             long_b, msg

  yields invalid Python code. However, converting to the following yields valid Python code:

  assert (long_a +
             long_b), msg

  So nose2pytest checks each argument expression (such as long_a +\n long_b) to see if it has newlines that would cause an invalid syntax, and if so, wraps them in parentheses. However, it is also important for readability of raw assertions that parentheses only be present if necessary. In other words,

  assert_func((long_a +
               long_b), msg)
  assert_func(z + (long_a +
                   long_b), msg)

  should convert to

  assert (long_a +
             long_b), msg
  assert z + (long_a +
                   long_b), msg)

  rather than

  assert ((long_a +
             long_b)), msg
  assert (z + (long_a +
                   long_b)), msg)

  So nose2pytest only tries to limit the addition of external parentheses to code that really needs it.

• Operator precedence: Python assigns a precedence to each operator; operators that are on the same level of precedence (like the comparison operators ==, >=, !=, etc) are executed in sequence. This poses a problem for two-argument assertion functions. Example: translating assert_equal(a != b, a <= c) to assert a != b == a <= c is incorrect, it must be converted to assert (a != b) == (a <= c). However wrapping every argument in parentheses all the time does not produce easy-to-read assertions: assert_equal(a, b < c) should convert to assert a == (b < c), not assert (a) == (b < c).

  So nose2pytest adds parentheses around its arguments if the operator used between the args has lower precedence than any operator found in the arg. So assert_equal(a, b + c) converts to assert a == b + c whereas assert_equal(a, b in c) converts to assert a == (b in c) but assert_in(a == b, c) converts to assert a == b in c).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to (AFAICT) Lennart Regebro for having written http://python3porting.com/fixers.html#find-pattern, and to those who answered my question on SO and my question on pytest-dev.