passing arguments to nosetest

Question

I write my nose unit tests to be fairly complete, but as a result they can take a while to run. I would like to be able to pass in an optional command-line argument to run some quick version of the tests (e.g. try a handful of possible inputs, instead of every possible input).

Ideally, I'd be able to say something like:

nosetest --quick my_module/tests/my_test.py

And in my_test.py, have:

def test_something():
    if nose.command_line_args.quick:
        <run quick test>
    else:
        <run long test>

Is there a simple way to do this? I know that one way might be to write a nose plugin, but I got scared away when the docs said I needed to install any plugins I write using setuptools. Learning setuptools to install a nose plugin all to just pass in a flag is a bit of yak-shaving I'd love to avoid if I can.

Answer 1

I don't think nosetests offers any way for you to add custom command-line options (except that of course you can edit its code to customize it for you, but that may not be practical).

In typical Unixy shells, however, you can set environment variables on the fly for any given command:

$ NOSEQUICK=1 nosetests my_module/tests/my_test.py

then in your code you can check if os.getenv('NOSEQUICK', ''):.