This question on StackOverflow pointed me to autonose. It wasn’t that easy to install using easy_install since one of its dependencies (snakefood) failed to install so I had to do that manually.

Unfortunately, autonose has a few issues, especially when running on Windows. Since it doesn’t appear to be updated anymore, I went searching for an alternative and found pyautotest, part of the Modipyd project. It doesn’t use nose, but that’s OK, because I wasn’t using anything that required it.

I had to install Modipyd by downloading its source from this GitHub repository and running python setup.py install.

Pyautotest is exactly what I was looking for–simple and works right out of the box without a nest of dependencies. The only part I was missing was support for Growl for Windows.

Ian Lewis and his co-workers released some custom test runners that can be used via pyautotest. The Growl version uses the growlnotify tool, but that didn’t work with the version of growlnotify.exe that works on Windows.

I started modifying their runner to work with growlnotify.exe, but it really bothered me how they copied and pasted the entire contents of the unittest.TextTestRunner.run method into their derived class so I threw together my own version which doesn’t contain such a flagrant disregard for object-oriented principles. You can clone/fork it here.

For the icons, I used Jamie Hill’s pass/fail smilies which I found here.

I hope this helps others trying to do TDD with Python. I absolutely love saving in Vim and seeing a green smiley face immediately appear. =)