I have a file called test_web.py containing a class TestWeb and many methods named like test_something().

I can run every test in the class like so:

$ nosetests test_web.py 
...
======================================================================
FAIL: checkout test
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/me/path/here/test_web.py", line 187, in test_checkout
...

But I can’t seem to run individual tests. These give me “No such test” errors when run in the same PWD:

$ nosetests test_web.py:test_checkout
$ nosetests TestWeb:test_checkout

What could be wrong here?

You must specify it like so: nosetests <file>:<Test_Case>.<test_method>, or

nosetests test_web.py:TestWeb.test_checkout

See the docs

You can also specify a module:

nosetests tests.test_integration:IntegrationTests.test_user_search_returns_users

Specifying names on the command line like the other answers suggest does work and is useful. However, when I’m in the midst of writing tests, I often find that I want to run just the test I’m working on, and the names that I would have to write on the command line get pretty long and cumbersome to write. In such case, I prefer to use a custom decorator and flag.

I define wipd (“work in progress decorator”) like this:

from nose.plugins.attrib import attr
def wipd(f):
    return attr('wip')(f)

This defines a decorator @wipd which will set the wip attribute on objects it decorates. For instance:

import unittest
class Test(unittest.TestCase):

    @wipd
    def test_something(self):
        pass

Then -a wip can be used at the command line to narrow the execution of the test to the ones marked with @wipd.

Note on names…

I’m using the name @wipd for the decorator rather than @wip to avoid this kind of problem:

import unittest
class Test(unittest.TestCase):

    from mymodule import wip    
    @wip
    def test_something(self):
        pass

    def test_something_else(self):
        pass

The import will make the wip decorator a member of the class, and all tests in the class will be selected. The attrib plugin checks the parent class of a test method to see if the attribute selected exists there too, and the attributes that are created and tested by attrib do not exist in a segregated space. So if you test with -a foo and your class contains foo = "platypus", then all tests in the class will be selected by the plugin.

To run multiple specific tests, you can just add them to the command line, separated by space.

nosetests test_web.py:TestWeb.test_checkout test_web.py:TestWeb.test_another_checkout

In my tests, specifying tests with module names do not work

You must specify the actual path to the .py:

nosetests /path/to/test/file.py:test_function

This with nose==1.3.7

My requirement was to run a single test in a test file that was in another windows directory – this was done from the anaconda command prompt as follows:

ran nosetests from:

(base) C:\Users\ABC\Documents\work\

but test_MyTestFile.py and methodsFile.py were in:

 (base) C:\Users\ABC\Documents\work\daily\

run single test by including path with quotes as follows:

(base) C:\Users\ABC\Documents\work>nosetests "daily\\test_MyTestFile.py:MyTestClass.test_add_integers"

test_MyTestFile.py looked like this:

import methodsFile
import unittest

class MyTestClass(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_add_integers(self):
        assert methodsFile.add(5, 3) == 8

    def test_add_integers_zero(self):
        assert methodsFile.add(3, 0) == 3

methodsFile.py looked like this:

def add(num1, num2):
        return num1 + num2