Unit testing with twisted is a bit difficult if the tests require the reactor to run. The official way is to use twisted's own unit testing framework called trial. It is very similar to the unittest module. If you would like to use another framework, or if you like nice IDE integration then utwist might be the right thing for you.
Note that it is considered good practice to write unit tests that don't perform IO. But for integration tests, and probably some unit-tests as well, you'll need a reactor running.
Disclaimer: utwist is quite a hack. It works, I test it regularly on Linux, OSX, and Windows, but future versions of twisted might break it. You've been warned. Hopefully twisted will come in with a better testing solution eventually.
This library is open source and released under the MIT License.
You can install it with pip install utwist. It doesn't need to compile anything, so there shouldn't be any surprises. Even on Windows.
from utwist import with_reactor
@with_reactor
def test_connect_with_tcp():
point = TCP4ClientEndpoint(reactor, "google.com", 80)
d = point.connect(MyFactory())
return dIf run with nose this will do exactly what you'd expect. It opens the network connection. The test will fail because the connection wasn't closed. utwist checks that the reactor is clean at the end of the test.
Of course you don't have to use nose. It works just as well with unittest, and probably also with most other frameworks.
If the test function returns a deferred then the test will be successful if the deferred resolves to a value or unsuccessful if the deferred errbacks.
If there is a function called twisted_setup() in the same class as the test function is defined, then this function will be invoked before the test, but already in the context of the reactor. Note that the regular setup function provided by the testing framework will be executed too, but not in the reactor context.
Accordingly, if there is a twisted_teardown() it executes after the test function, even if the test failed.
If the test, including twisted_setup and twisted_teardown, has not completed within the timeout, the test fails. The timeout defaults to two minutes. A timeout duration of zero disables the timeout.
To specify a different timeout pass it (in seconds) to the decorator:
@with_reactor(timeout=10)
def test_quick():
...I spare you the details, but utwist starts the reactor in a separate thread when the first test is started and lets it run until the end (the reactor cannot be restarted). It uses blockingCallFromThread() to run the test method inside the reactor. Other than that there are some tricks to check if the reactor is clean, and to clean it if not. There is also a very dirty hack to make signals work even though the reactor doesn't run in the main thread.
This project is hosted here utwist github page.
If you don't mind using a cut-down version of unittest for your tests, nor to run the tests with the special runner, then I highly recommend trial. It is the official unit testing tool provided by twisted.