The Nikola Test Suite

Nikola, like many software projects, has a test suite. There are over 100 tests.

Tests (in alphabetical order)

• test_command_import_wordpress tests the WordPress importer for Nikola.
• test_command_init checks whether new sites are created properly via the init command.
• test_compile_markdown exercises the Markdown compiler plugin of Nikola.
• test_integration are used to validate that sites actually build.
• test_locale tests the locale support of Nikola.
• test_plugin_importing checks three basic plugins to know whether they get imported properly.
• test_rss_feeds asserts that RSS created by Nikola is sane.
• test_rst_compiler exercises the reStructuredText compiler plugin of Nikola.
• test_scheduling performs tests on post scheduling rules.
• test_utils test various Nikola utilities.

Requirements to run the tests

You need:

• pip install -r requirements-tests.txt
• a few minutes’ time
• appropriate locale settings

How to set the locale for Nikola tests?

For testing nikola needs to specify two languages, each one with a supported locale. By default, the test suite uses en and pl as languages, and their respective default locale for them.

The choice of Polish is due to having one locale to generate instead of 20 (Spanish) and you can happily ignore it — just set the language–locale pairs by exporting two shell variables, for example:

export NIKOLA_LOCALE_DEFAULT=en,en_US.utf8
export NIKOLA_LOCALE_OTHER=pl,pl_PL.utf8

In Windows that would be:

set NIKOLA_LOCALE_DEFAULT=en,English
set NIKOLA_LOCALE_OTHER=pl,Polish

Replace the part before the comma with a Nikola translation selector (see nikola/conf.py.in for details), and the part after the comma with an installed glibc locale.

To check if the desired locale is supported in your host you can, in a python console:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'locale_name')
# for example, 'en_US.utf8' (posix) 'English' (windows)
# if it does not traceback, then python can use that locale

Alternatively, if you have some disk space to spare, you can install the two default locales. Here is how to do that in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-en language-pack-pl

How to execute the tests

The command to execute tests is:

doit coverage

Note that Travis does not use this command — and as such, differences between the two may appear.

In Windows you want to drop the doctests parts, they fail over trivial differences in OS details.

It is also recommended to run nikola help to see if Nikola actually works.

If you are committing code, make sure to run flake8 --ignore=E501 . to see if you comply with the PEP 8 style guide and do not have basic code mistakes (we ignore the 79-characters-per-line rule).

In windows ignore the two flake8 diagnostics about messages_sl_si.py , they are artifacts of (symlinks + git + windows).

Travis CI

We also run our tests on Travis CI. You can check the current build status there.

Writing tests

• When adding new *.py files under tests/ , remember to include at the begining the lines:

  # This code is so you can run the samples without installing the package,
  # and should be before any import touching nikola, in any file under tests/
  import os
  import sys
  sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '..'))
  

  Those lines allow to run the tests without installing nikola.