According to the Django docs regarding tests, the --keepdb flag will preserve the the test database for future runs.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-option---keepdb
Just to be clear, will any changes made to the database by the tests (ie: object.save() ) be reset automatically? Or will these changes need to be reversed from within the tests?
If you're using Django's default TestCase, all tests are run in a transaction, which is rolled back when the tests finishes. If your database supports transactions, you won't have to clean up anything.
If you're using Django's LiveServerTestCase or TransactionTestCase, all tables are truncated after each test, and the initial data, which is serialized before the test, is reloaded into the test database. This will not preserve any data for migrated apps, only for unmigrated apps.
The --keepdb option will not do anything special with the database. It simply prevents that the test database is destroyed, and if a database is found at the start of the tests, it is used instead of creating a new one. So, any data that is somehow left in the database when the tests finish will be seen as initial data. This is mostly relevant if some error or a user interrupt prevents tests without transactions from cleaning up the database. In that case it may be a good idea to recreate the database.
Related
When running tests, you can do:
./manage.py test --keepdb
To run your tests, and keep the test database.
Is it possible to have the django shell actually connect to it, so we can interactively access the test database the same way the Django shell can normally work with the production database?
Note that the answer and its comments here imply that you can access it by doing something like:
from django import test
test.utils.setup_test_environment()
from django.db import connection
db = connection.creation.create_test_db(keepdb=True)
But when I do that, my database appears to be empty when I do queries.
I ran into this, at first I thought it was because the codebase I'm working on has a flush call in the teardown function, but my DB was still empty after removing those. Maybe there were more flushes somewhere I didn't catch.
I ended up getting around this by sleeping at the end of the test, so it doesn't exit and doesn't clean up.
I have a Django (v1.4, using Postgresql) project which I've written a bunch of working unittests for. These use FactoryBoy to generate most of their data.
I'm now starting to write some integration tests using LiveServerTestCase with Selenium. I've just realised that my tests and the live test server use different databases. Which means that data created by factories in my tests aren't available to Selenium.
I'm not sure of the best way to progress. I think I could use fixtures to supply data that would work, although this is a pain having got this far using factories instead.
Is there a way I can continue to use factories to generate data that will work for my Selenium tests? Really I'd like my tests and LiveServerTestCase to use the same database.
I found out why this happened to me, and some possible workarounds, including Ilya Baryshev's answer above.
If your test descends from Django's TestCase, and if your database supports transactions, then each test runs in its own transaction, and nobody outside (no other thread, external process, or other test) can see the objects created in the database by your test.
LiveServerTestCase uses threads, so it would suffer from this problem. So the designers made it inherit from TransactionTestCase instead of TestCase, which disables these transactions, so that changes are globally visible.
What happened to me was that I added some mixins to my test class, and one of them pulled in TestCase. This doesn't cause an error, but it silently replaces the base class of LiveServerTestCase with TestCase, which enables transactions again, causing the problem that you describe.
Ilya's SQLite memory database workaround works because Django contains code that detects when using a SQLite :memory: database that actually shares the same connection between threads, so you see your test's objects in the LiveServerThread because they're inside the same transaction. However this comes with some caveats:
It’s important to prevent simultaneous database queries via this shared connection by the two threads, as that may sometimes randomly cause the tests to fail. So you need to ensure that the two threads don’t access the database at the same time. In particular, this means that in some cases (for example, just after clicking a link or submitting a form), you might need to check that a response is received by Selenium and that the next page is loaded before proceeding with further test execution. Do this, for example, by making Selenium wait until the HTML tag is found in the response (requires Selenium > 2.13)...
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/testing/#live-test-server
In my case, once we identifier that autocommit was being turned off when the test started, and tracked down why (because we had entered TestCase code that we shouldn't have done), we were able to fix the inheritance hierarchy to avoid pulling in TestCase, and then the same database was visible from both the live server thread and the test.
This also works with Postgres databases, so it would provide a solution for velotron.
Have you tried using sqlite as your database backend for tests?
When using an in-memory SQLite database to run the tests, the same
database connection will be shared by two threads in parallel: the
thread in which the live server is run and the thread in which the
test case is run.
from Django docs
If you're not using anything beyond regular ORM, you might benefit from test speedups as well.
Some of my requirements are these:
Create a in-memory sqlite3 database.
Read a list, and pull those data from
production database.
Perform unit tests
Remain the test database.
Perform some intelligent UI tests using the same test database.
I am not a pro in test, but these have to achieved, anyone professional who can suggest a best practice in this area?
Thanks very much for your help!
New in Django 1.8
The --keepdb option can be used to preserve the test database between test runs
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-option---keepdb
You can run:
./manage.py testserver
Your test database will be created, all your tests are run and afterwards the server keeps running, so you can do your ui testing.
hope this helps,
Anton
Persistent Database Test Runner adds a new command called quicktest that will retain the database after the test is run, and use the same when run again.
I'm having a hard time customizing the test database setup behavior. I would like to achieve the following:
The test suites need to use an existing database
The test suite shouldn't erase or recreate the database instead load the data from a mysql dump
Since the db is populated from a dump, no fixtures should be loaded
Upon finishing tests the database shouldn't be destroyed
I'm having a hard time getting the testsuiterunner to bypass creation.
Fast forward to 2016 and the ability to retain the database between tests has been built into django. It's available in the form of the --keep flag to manage.py
New in Django 1.8. Preserves the test database between test runs. This
has the advantage of skipping both the create and destroy actions
which can greatly decrease the time to run tests, especially those in
a large test suite. If the test database does not exist, it will be
created on the first run and then preserved for each subsequent run.
Any unapplied migrations will also be applied to the test database
before running the test suite.
This pretty much fullfills all the criteria you have mentioned in your questions. In fact it even goes one step further. There is no need to import the dump before each and every run.
This TEST_RUNNER works in Django 1.3
from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner as TestRunner
class DjangoTestSuiteRunner(TestRunner):
def setup_databases(self, **kwargs):
pass
def teardown_databases(self, old_config, **kwargs):
pass
You'll need to provide a custom test runner.
The bits your interested in overriding with the default django.test.runner.DiscoverRunner are the DiscoverRunner.setup_databases and DiscoverRunner.teardown_databases methods. These two methods are involved with creating and destroying test databases and are executed only once. You'll want to provide test-specific project settings that use your existing test database by default and override these so that the dump data is loaded and the test database isn't destroyed.
Depending on the size and contents of the dump, a safe bet might be to just create a subprocess that will pipe the dump to your database's SQL command-line interface, otherwise you might be able to obtain a cursor and execute queries directly.
If your looking to get rid of fixture loading completely, you can provide a custom base test case that extends Django's default django.test.testcases.TestCase with the TestCase._fixutre_setup and TestCase._fixutre_teardown methods overriden to be noop.
Caveat emptor: this runner will make it impossible to facilitate tests for anything but your application's sources. It's possible to customize the runner to create a specific alias for a connection to your existing database and load the dump, then provide a custom test case that overrides TestCase._database_names to point to it's alias.
Running Django unit tests is far too slow. Especially when I just want to run one test but the test runner wants to create the entire database and destroy the whole thing just for that one test.
In the case where I have not changed any of my models, I could save oodles of time if Django would not bother trying to create and destroy the entire database, and instead saved it for next time. Better yet, it would be great if the test runner was capable of being able to see which models have changed and only replacing those prior to running tests.
I'd prefer to not have to subclass the test runner myself, but that's what I'm going to have to do if I don't find a solution soon. is there anything like this already in existence?
In django1.8 added new parameter for manage.py test command --keepdb
./manage.py test --keepdb
Have you tried using an in-memory SQLite database for tests? It's much faster than using a disk-based database.
I'm using Djang-nose. If you set a env var REUSE_DB=1 it will not destroy the DB after running tests and re-use that same DB for the next run. Whenever your schema changes, just set REUSE_DB=0 and do one 'full' run. After that reset it to 1 and you're good to go.
https://github.com/django-nose/django-nose