Basic usage ----------- Use the nosetests script (after installation by setuptools):: nosetests [options] [(optional) test files or directories] In addition to passing command-line options, you may also put configuration options in a .noserc or nose.cfg file in your home directory. These are standard .ini-style config files. Put your nosetests configuration in a [nosetests] section, with the -- prefix removed:: [nosetests] verbosity=3 with-doctest=1 There is also possiblity to disable configuration files loading (might be useful when runnig i.e. tox and you don't want your global nose config file to be used by tox). In order to ignore those configuration files simply set an environment variable ``NOSE_IGNORE_CONFIG_FILES``. There are several other ways to use the nose test runner besides the `nosetests` script. You may use nose in a test script:: import nose nose.main() If you don't want the test script to exit with 0 on success and 1 on failure (like unittest.main), use nose.run() instead:: import nose result = nose.run() `result` will be true if the test run succeeded, or false if any test failed or raised an uncaught exception. Lastly, you can run nose.core directly, which will run nose.main():: python /path/to/nose/core.py Please see the usage message for the nosetests script for information about how to control which tests nose runs, which plugins are loaded, and the test output. Extended usage ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ .. autohelp ::