How to test single application (not project) in Django?

Question

I would like to test my small application, that I keep in a separate package. Right now I created a "test_project" directory, created a test project there and I am using the project's manage.py to run tests. But I keep wondering - is there a better method? Is it possible to launch a single app's tests, perhaps with some default configuration (like, sqlite database)?

Answer 1

Writing this down because I don't see it on here yet

From the docs

If your django structure looks something like this as it should:

Project dir/
    /myapp
    /myotherapp
    /myproject

Django allows you to execute test from only "myotherapp" by executing:

./manage.py test myotherapp/

This will execute all test under "myotherapp" whereas

./manage.py test 

will execute all test in your projects directory.

Answer 2

It is possible to run a single app's tests standalone, without creating a Django test project for that purpose. One way of doing so is by creating a runtests.py in your app's root dir which setups Django settings and runs ./manage.py test your_app programmatically. One example of runtests.py is Django's own: runtests.py (documentation).

Django's own runtests.py is a good reference but I find it convoluted for most cases. Below are a couple of alternative examples:

• Django-Modeltranslation
• My own minimalistic one