Django LiveServerTestCase: User created in in setUpClass method not available in test_method?

Question

I am using Django 1.4's LiveServerTestCase for Selenium testing and am having trouble with the setUpClass class method. As far as I understand MembershipTests.setUpClass is run once before the unit tests are run.

I've put code to add a user to the database in MembershipTests.setUpClass but when I run the MembershipTests.test_signup test no user has been added to the test database. What am I doing incorrectly? I expect the user I created in setUpClass would be available across all unit tests.

If I put the user creation code in MembershipTests.setUp and run MembershipTests.test_signup I can see the user, but don't want this run before every unit test as setUp is. As you can see, I use a custom LiveServerTestCase class to add basic functionality across all of my tests (test_utils.CustomLiveTestCase). I suspect this has something to do with my issue.

Thanks in advance.

test_utils.py:

from selenium.webdriver.firefox.webdriver import WebDriver
from django.test import LiveServerTestCase

class CustomLiveTestCase(LiveServerTestCase):

    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        cls.wd = WebDriver()
        super(CustomLiveTestCase, cls).setUpClass()

    @classmethod
    def tearDownClass(cls):
        cls.wd.quit()
        super(CustomLiveTestCase, cls).tearDownClass()

tests.py:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.test.utils import override_settings
from test_utils import CustomLiveTestCase 
from test_constants import *

@override_settings(STRIPE_SECRET_KEY='xxx', STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY='xxx')
class MembershipTests(CustomLiveTestCase):

    fixtures = [
        'account_extras/fixtures/test_socialapp_data.json',
        'membership/fixtures/basic/plan.json',
    ]

    def setUp(self):
        pass

    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        super(MembershipTests, cls).setUpClass()
        user = User.objects.create_user(
            TEST_USER_USERNAME,
            TEST_USER_EMAIL,
            TEST_USER_PASSWORD
        )

    def test_signup(self):
        print "users: ", User.objects.all()

Answer 1

Since you're using LiveServerTestCase it's almost same as TransactionTestCase which creates and destroys database (truncates tables) for every testcase ran.

So you really can't do global data with LiveServerTestCase.

Answer 2

The database is torn down and reloaded on every test method, not on the test class. So your user will be lost each time. Do that in setUp not setUpClass.