Django Test DB

django-test-db is a library designed to make your tests faster without having to write your code differently. It bypasses the django sql layers and stores objects in memory in a simple data store. It respects the majority of the Manager/QuerySet API. When you deploy the code to a CI server, you can simply set an environment variable, and the code will instead use a real database to check that you haven't accidentally introduced any data integrity problems which would not be validated by the test database.

This is pre-alpha software, it's not feature complete and the below usage probably doesn't work yet.

Usage

The simplest way to use the library is to use mock to patch your model classes.

@mock.patch.object(Artist.objects, 'get_queryset', lambda: QuerySet(Artist))

This isn't ideal though, as you need a separate mock for each model, and also for each related_manager_cls associated with a many to many field, reverse foreign key or similar.

Autodiscovery of the models which need patching can be achieved by decorating your test cases:

@test_db('myapp.views', 'myapp.mixins')

The decorator will look in the modules views and mixins within myapp to find model classes which need patching. As always with mock, this needs to be the locations the code is called, not the locations the models live in.

The decorator can be turned off by setting the environment variable USE_REAL_DB=1.