[Qgis-developer] How to debug and unit test Python plugins outside QGIS (e.g. in Ecplise IDE + PyDev)

[Martin Dobias]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 12:57 AM, Stefan Keller <sfkeller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to writing Python plugins for QGIS and I like to debug and
> unit test theses outside QGIS runtime but don't see any instructions
> on how to do this.
>
> Of course, the ultimate test of any plugin is to run it inside QGIS.
> But I'd like do that outside QGIS for example in Eclipse IDE (+ PyDev)
> in order to get code-completion, to debug it and to write unit tests
> on it.
>
> The problem is that one gets "ImportError: No module named ..." with
> mostly PyQt4/qgis modules which (of course) cannot be imported.

Hi Stefan

I think most of the relevant information is covered in the cookbook:
http://www.qgis.org/pyqgis-cookbook/intro.html#python-applications

I hope PyDev has a configuration dialog where you can add your custom
python paths to avoid these import errors.

The only difference when running unit-tests (i.e. standalone apps) is
that you cannot access QGIS interface (qgis.utils.iface) since there
is no QGIS running. But that should not pose a big problem. In case
you really need access to that interface you can create your own
implementation of QgisInterface class and assign it to
qgis.utils.iface.

Regards
Martin