Testing

While there's always manual testing involved in programming, automated tests can make your life a lot easier by helping to determine if you broke anything you haven't thought about. Plus, who likes testing the same thing over and over again?

Running Tests

First off, you'll need a test.ini. The easiest way to go about creating one of these is to reuse the file you're using for the server:

[$]> cd /path/to/r2
[$]> ln -s development.ini test.ini

Now you can run nosetests to run the tests:

[$]> nosetests                             # Run all available tests in r2/tests.
[$]> nosetests -w unit/lib                 # Run only the unit tests.
[$]> nosetests --tests unit.lib.utils_test # Run only the utils unit tests.

You may find yourself running into a Postgres connection limit error, eg remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections. An easy way to deal with this is to stop the server, run your tests, then start the server once again when you want to view the website:

[$]> sudo initctl emit reddit-stop
[$]> nosetests
[$]> sudo initctl emit reddit-start

See also the Pylons and nose docs.

Writing Tests

For the most part, you should use the general unittest.TestCase. If you're getting errors about the environment, make sure your test file has from r2.tests import RedditTestCase before you try to import any models.