Django Projects to Django Apps: Converting the Unit Tests

Recently I went through a process of breaking a large django project into smaller installable applications. Each smaller component could be reused from within any number of django projects, but wasn’t a django project itself. One of the issues I encountered was “What do I do with the unit tests?” Using the standard ./manage.py test no longer worked for me because my settings where in the master project.

I had heard of py.test, so this seemed like an opportunity to see if some of the py.test magic would work for me. Admittedly, I didn’t do a large amount of searching around for additional testing frameworks or processes…this was an excuse to try out the project. :)

Installation

Installing py.test is easy. Because I wanted some additional features (DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable specifically), so I opted for the pytest-django module instead of the base pytest project.

pip install pytest-django

Configuration

To get my unit tests running, I needed to add a few additional things:

a test settings file
a conftest.py file
a pytest.ini file
a small amount of test package cleanup

test settings file

Created a very light settings file with only my database configuration

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': ':memory:',
        }
}

conftest.py

This was required to fix an issue with my settings file location.

  import os
  import sys

  sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(__file__))

pytest.ini file

As a convenience, instead of passing parameters on the commandline each time, py.test uses a pytest.ini file to pass these arguments to the test runner.

[pytest]
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = tests.pytest_settings

test package cleanup

py.test has smarter test resolution. To take advantage of these features, I did the following:

Removed statements like from mytests import * from the __init__.py files
Changed the name of my tests to match test* format

Wrap-up

Hopefully this post helps future me and others to quickly get up and running with py.test and pytest-django.