django unit tests without a db

Question

Is there a possibility to write django unittests without setting up a db? I want to test business logic which doesn\'t require the db to set up. And while it is fast to setu

Answer 1

My web host only allows creating and dropping databases from their Web GUI, so I was getting a "Got an error creating the test database: Permission denied" error when trying to run python manage.py test.

I'd hoped to use the --keepdb option to django-admin.py but it doesn't seem to be supported any longer as of Django 1.7.

What I ended up doing was modifying the Django code in .../django/db/backends/creation.py, specifically the _create_test_db and _destroy_test_db functions.

For _create_test_db I commented out the cursor.execute("CREATE DATABASE ... line and replaced it with pass so the try block wouldn't be empty.

For _destroy_test_db I just commented out cursor.execute("DROP DATABASE - I didn't need to replace it with anything because there was already another command in the block (time.sleep(1)).

After that my tests ran fine - though I did set up a test_ version of my regular database separately.

This isn't a great solution of course, because it will break if Django is upgraded, but I had a local copy of Django due to using virtualenv so at least I have control over when/if I upgrade to a newer version.