Nose unable to find tests in ubuntu

Is there any reason why Nose wouldn't be able to find tests in Ubuntu 9.04?

I'm using nose 0.11.1 with python 2.5.4.
I can run tests only if I explicitly specify the filename. If I don't specify the filename it just says, 0 tests.

The same project runs tests fine on my Mac, so I'm quite stumped!


The other thing which always gets me with nose is that it won't run tests in executable files. I'm not exactly sure why that would make a difference across Mac/Ubuntu, but it's worth a shot.

Make sure that the scripts didn't somehow get chmod +x'd on the Mac… And if they did, fix them with chmod -x $(find tests/ -name '*.py').


This behavior is almost certainly because your files are not named in accordance with nose's test matching behavior. From the nose docs:

nose collects tests automatically from python source files, directories and packages found in its working directory (which defaults to the current working directory). Any python source file, directory or package that matches the testMatch regular expression (by default: (?:^|[b_.-])[Tt]est) will be collected as a test (or source for collection of tests).

Emphasis was mine.

Some example names that would match:

  • TestFoo.py
  • Foo-Test.py
  • Foo_Test.py
  • Foo.Test.py (note that this one will try to import Foo, and will raise an exception if it cannot)

A name that looks like it would match, but actually does not:

  • FooTest.py

If you just rename your files you should be good to go.


Update: I wasn't able to tell from the details you've posted, but maybe your test directories are missing their __init__.py files?

... make sure that your “tests” directories are actually modules (they have an empty __init__.py file).


I had the same problem. My tests ran just fine in Windows, but not in Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu, if you run:

nosetests -vv --collect-only

You'll probably see that it's skipping your test file because it's an executable: _Tools/LintControlFiles/test_HgLint.py is executable; skipped

In order to get nose to consider executables, run it like this:

nosetests --exe