Disable migrations when running unit tests in Django 1.7

Look at this workaround, posted by Bernie Sumption to the Django developers mailing list:

If makemigrations has not yet been run, the "migrate" command treats an app as unmigrated, and creates tables directly from the models just like syncdb did in 1.6. I defined a new settings module just for unit tests called "settings_test.py", which imports * from the main settings module and adds this line:

MIGRATION_MODULES = {"myapp": "myapp.migrations_not_used_in_tests"}

Then I run tests like this:

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="myapp.settings_test" python manage.py test

This fools migrate into thinking that the app is unmigrated, and so every time a test database is created it reflects the current structure of models.py.

In Django 1.9, this situation is improved somewhat, and you can set the value to None:

MIGRATION_MODULES = {"myapp": None}

Here is the end of my settings file :

class DisableMigrations(object):

    def __contains__(self, item):
        return True

    def __getitem__(self, item):
        return None


TESTS_IN_PROGRESS = False
if 'test' in sys.argv[1:] or 'jenkins' in sys.argv[1:]:
    logging.disable(logging.CRITICAL)
    PASSWORD_HASHERS = (
        'django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',
    )
    DEBUG = False
    TEMPLATE_DEBUG = False
    TESTS_IN_PROGRESS = True
    MIGRATION_MODULES = DisableMigrations()

based on this snippet

I disabled migrations only when tests are running

django-test-without-migrations adds a --nomigrations flag to manage.py test. Works like a charm.