We are always happy to recieve Pull Requests. When you open a PR, it will automatically build on Travis. So you're not strictly required to test the patch locally before submitting it.
If you do want to run the tests locally you'll need to pip install tox and
then run one of the tox commands below.
# These commands are pretty fast and will tell if you if you've
# broken something major:
tox -e flake8
tox -e py27-nonhdfs
# You can also test particular files for even faster iterations
tox -e py27-nonhdfs test/rpc_test.py
# And some of the others involve downloading and running Hadoop:
tox -e py33-cdh
tox -e py34-hdpWhere flake8 is the lint checking, py27 is obviously Python 2.7.
nonhdfs are tests not running on the Hadoop minicluster and cdh and
hdp are two different hadoop distributions. For most local development it's
usually enough to run the lint checking and a python version for nonhdfs
and let Travis run for the whole matrix.
For cdh and hdp, tox will download the hadoop distribution for you. You however have to have Java installed and the JAVA_HOME environment variable set.
For more details, check out the .travis.yml and tox.ini files.