GracefulHarakiri

Plugin for nosetests that intercepts SIGTERM signals, converts them to SIGINT and prints the stacktrace.

Motivation

Jenkins kills the builds that exceed a specific amount of time, by sending them a SIGTERM signal.

If nosetests receives a SIGTERM signal, it stops abruptly and does not display any information where it left off. This information would be valuable in debugging the test that got stuck.

Enter GracefulHarakiri, a plugin that intercepts the SIGTERM signal and converts it to a SIGINT signal, thus making nosetests exit gracefully. The plugin also outputs the current stack frame (and all previous ones), much like Python does when displaying a Traceback object.

Setup and usage

To install it you can use easy_install:

  $ sudo easy_install gracefulharakiri

The usage is also pretty simple: just specify --with-gracefulharakiri on the command line.

Example

Suppose you run the following test, in test_dummy.py:

  import time
  def test_nothing():
        time.sleep(120)

If you run it without this plugin and kill it via a SIGTERM, you would see:

  $ nosetests -sv test_dummy.py
  2015-04-27 11:27:17 : test_dummy.test_nothing ... Terminated

If you enabled the GracefulHarakiri plugin:

  $ nosetests -sv --with-gracefulharakiri test_dummy.py
  2015-04-27 11:29:44 : test_dummy.test_nothing ... Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/local/bin/nosetests", line 8, in <module>
  [... trimmed output ...]
    File "/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/nose-1.3.4-py2.6.egg/nose/case.py", line 197, in runTest
        self.test(*self.arg)                                                                              
    File "/home/user/test_dummy.py", line 4, in test_nothing             
        time.sleep(120)