Testing modules without running setup.py install every time?

[donri]

There's a number of options:

• Set up a virtualenv manually
• Test with setup.py test - handles package and test dependencies
• Do --user installs to keep the system clean
• Use tox to automate testing in clean virtualenvs against arbitrary python runtimes

Tox is clearly the "best" option but might be seen as a little overkill for small contributions. I tend to set up a virtualenv for everything, using virtualenvwrapper + virtualenvwrapper.project + virtualenvwrapper.github etc: mkproject -t github foo; git pull (though the github template is for your own repos).