Run Unittest On Main Django Database

Question

I'm looking for a way to run a full celery setup during django tests, asked in this other SO question

After thinking about it, I think I could settle for running a unittest (it's more of an integration test) in which I run the test script against the main Django (development) database. Is there a way to write unittests, run them with Nose and do so against the main database? I imagine it would be a matter of telling Nose (or whatever other framework) about the django settings.

I've looked at django-nose but wasn't able to find a way to tell it to use the main DB and not a test one.

joshua · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-19T08:10:41.320

5

I don't know about nose, but here is how to run against and existing db with django (1.6) unit tests.

from django.test.runner import DiscoverRunner
from django.db import transaction

class ExistingDBTestRunner(DiscoverRunner):

    def run_tests(self, test_labels, extra_tests=None, **kwargs):
        self.setup_test_environment()
        suite = self.build_suite(test_labels, extra_tests)
        #old_config = self.setup_databases()
        result = self.run_suite(suite)
        #self.teardown_databases(old_config)
        self.teardown_test_environment()
        return self.suite_result(suite, result)

Then in settings.py

if 'test' in sys.argv:
     TEST_RUNNER = '<?>.ExistingDBTestRunner'
     # alternative db settings?

It will be a little different in older versions of django. Also, you may need to override _fixture_setup and _fixture_teardown in your test cases to pass.

The above code will connect to a preexisting database but since each test is wrapped in a transaction the changes won't be available to other connections (like the celery worker). The easiest way to disable transactions is to subclass from unittest.TestCase instead of django.test.TestCase.

edited Dec 19 '13 at 08:10

answered Dec 17 '13 at 21:35

joshua

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joshua, thanks, that's a good start. Two questions. First, where would I drop the test runner code into. Using Django 1.5.1. Any way to get it working on it? https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-discover-runner seems like it might help, but don't really want to change the way all my tests are run for now, or at least minimize having to re-write old tests, not sure if that's a fair assumption. – Andres Dec 18 '13 at 09:38
In Django 1.5 sub class 'django.test.simple.DjangoTestSuiteRunner' and basically do the same thing (remove setup and teardown of test databases). You also might not be able to rely on a savepoint rollback because django doesn't really get this right until 1.6. – joshua Dec 18 '13 at 19:52
As you say, it will be hard to integrate existing tests. You could write a new test suite as a management command. Look at this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1648881/426600 – joshua Dec 18 '13 at 20:00
so close! I tried implementing it, by installing django-discover-runner and essentially replacing the django 1.6 DiscoverRunner with the one provided by the former. Although it runs without a hitch, it doesn't seem to be writing to the main DB. If I create an object in the tests, drop into pdb, then from another python shell try to retrieve it, it's nowhere to be found. Any ideas? – Andres Dec 18 '13 at 20:26
I'm guessing it's because transactions aren't being committed. Are you using TransactionMiddleware? – joshua Dec 18 '13 at 20:36
I wasn't. Added it and no dice. – Andres Dec 18 '13 at 20:44
let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/43455/discussion-between-andres-and-joshua) – Andres Dec 18 '13 at 20:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 17 '13 at 17:28

0

Have you had a look at django-nose? It seems like it would be the right tool for the job.

answered Dec 17 '13 at 17:28

David

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1

Right, I have looked at it. Do you know a way to get django-nose to use the main DB instead of it creating a test DB? – Andres Dec 17 '13 at 17:40
have a look into django_nose/runner.py because there is a way to not create db on each run. Maybe you could wire the real db name in the _get_test_db_name() function and use the REUSE_DB env var? – David Dec 17 '13 at 17:59

Run Unittest On Main Django Database

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