Doing what you aren’t supposed to do with Django tests

So I wanted to run my django test scripts against my development database. The django test system really wants to create a database from scratch but I wanted to see whether I could run against my local scratch copy since its already got a lot of data in it and I am too lazy to make fixtures etc.

Some googling produced alot of very helpful “You are doing it wrong!” comments which is fine as far as that goes but I am not good at taking advice.

Digging a little deeper I found you can override the DjangoTestSuiteRunner. Now we are getting somewhere.

put this in settings.py:

TEST_RUNNER = 'myapp.test_extras.NoTestDbDatabaseTestRunner'

And then define the NoTestDbDatabaseTestRunner:

from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner
class NoTestDbDatabaseTestRunner(DjangoTestSuiteRunner):
    def setup_databases(self, **kwargs):
        pass
    def teardown_databases(self, old_config, **kwargs):
        pass

I’m feeling pretty good about this. I try a simple “test” which just counts the number of items in a particular table.

Only what I get is a completely wiped out local db. Nice.

The trick is that my TestCase was using

from django.test import TestCase

which has its own ideas about what to do with the database and it was wiping it out. Switching to:

unittest.TestCase

from django.test import SimpleTestCase

Maybe I should just listen more.

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