How to run django unit-tests on production database?

Question

i'm starting the TDD development attitude and am writting unit-tests for my django application. I'm aware of fixtures and know that's the way tests should be executed, but for a given test i do need to execute it on the whole database, and json fixture for 10+ million row database is not something i'd like to handle, moreover, this test is "read-only".

So the question is how are you setting up your test suites to run on the production database? I imagine it could be as easy as adding the DATABASE_NAME setting in the setUp method of certain test. But the settings.DATABASE_NAME="prod_db" results in "NameError: global name 'settings' is not defined" while running the test. Moreover, there is a risk described in http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/11987, that you can accidentally delete a production database.

So, how is it possible, or, even better, what is best practice, to run a single test of a test suite on a production database instead of temporary one?

Cheers in advance for any opinions!

Answer 1

In case someone googles here searching for the solution for a given problem, here is the skeleton on how to perform unit tests on django production database. Check the django docs section here, for the file/directory structure, and instructions on where to put the given code. It should go in yourapp/management/commands/newcommandname.py, and both the management and commands folders should contain empty __init__.py files which makes python treat them as valid modules.

The test suite can by run as:

$python manage.py newcommandname

And here comes the code you should put in yourapp/management/commands/newcommandname.py:

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
import unittest

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = """
    If you need Arguments, please check other modules in 
    django/core/management/commands.
    """

    def handle(self, **options):
        suite = unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(TestChronology)
        unittest.TextTestRunner().run(suite)


class TestChronology(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        print "Write your pre-test prerequisites here"

    def test_equality(self):
        """
        Tests that 1 + 1 always equals 2.
        """
        from core.models import Yourmodel
        self.failUnlessEqual(1 + 1, 2)