[TIP] Testing a daemon with coverage (nose)

Alfredo Deza arufuredosan at gmail.com
Fri May 8 05:58:57 PDT 2009


On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com>wrote:

> Alfredo Deza wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have just started to get into the habit of testing everything that I
>> code, and a good friend of mine suggested the coverage plugin when using
>> Nosetests.
>>
>> Right now I am working on a Daemon module for Python scripts. The module,
>> when imported will make the current process detach from the terminal and run
>> in the background as a daemon.
>>
>> When trying to test the module (importing it to test_module.py) I fail to
>> correctly test any actions since it will convert test_module.py into a
>> daemon.
>>
>> To circumvent this problem I created a "daemon script" (test_script.py)
>> that would import the daemon module and effectively run in the background.
>>
>> The tests would check upon this daemon and the actions the module should
>> be doing when working correctly (write to a file, kill a process etc).
>>
>> And this solution works fine for testing, but the "--with-coverage" flag
>> does not cover the daemon module at all.
>>
>> When going further and specifying the package with
>> "--cover-package=daemonModule" I get 0% coverage. I'm thinking this is
>> expected since I am not importing the daemon module within test_module.py
>> but rather on the daemon test script (test_script.py).
>>
>> And just to avoid some confusion, this is what I have:
>> test_script.py => Script that will correctly daemonize so I can test
>> behavior test_module.py => Where all the tests go. Can't import the daemon
>> module here or this will detach from the terminal.
>>
>> Do you guys know any other way that I could effectively test the daemon
>> while still being able to maintain the Coverage plugin with a nice
>> percentage value?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>> Alfredo
>>
> I'm not sure I've got all the details right, but it sounds like the basic
> problem is that you have a test that nose can measure, but that test spawns
> a new process, and the code in the new process is not measured.  Ironically,
> I have the same problem when coverage-testing coverage.py!
> One possibility is to remove daemonization from the test run.  This is
> similar to the testing technique of using test doubles to remove complicated
> dependencies from tests.  If your code is organized so that the main() of
> the daemon is callable directly, you can write a test that invokes the main
> directly, rather than in a separate process, and measure code coverage that
> way.
>
> Another method would be to invoke coverage programmatically in the daemon
> itself.  This is less desirable because you have to modify your product code
> to deal with testing issues, but would give you more realistic measurement
> since the code really is running as a daemon.
>
> --Ned.
>
> --
> Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com
>

Ned,

You are correct, the test spawns a new process.

I like the idea of removing the daemonization from the test run, or testing
all the way up to when the module kicks the daemonization call.

Thanks for you input.


-Alfredo
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