Detect django testing mode

I'm writing a reusable django app and I need to ensure that its models are only sync'ed when the app is in test mode. I've tried to use a custom DjangoTestRunner, but I found no examples of how to do that (the documentation only shows how to define a custom test runner).

So, does anybody have an idea of how to do it?

EDIT

Here's how I'm doing it:

#in settings.py
import sys
TEST = 'test' in sys.argv

Hope it helps.

I think the answer provided here https://stackoverflow.com/a/7651002/465673 is a much cleaner way of doing it:

Put this in your settings.py:

import sys

TESTING = sys.argv[1:2] == ['test']

The selected answer is a massive hack. :)

A less-massive hack would be to create your own TestSuiteRunner subclass and change a setting or do whatever else you need to for the rest of your application. You specify the test runner in your settings:

TEST_RUNNER = 'your.project.MyTestSuiteRunner'

In general, you don't want to do this, but it works if you absolutely need it.

from django.conf import settings
from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner

class MyTestSuiteRunner(DjangoTestSuiteRunner):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        settings.IM_IN_TEST_MODE = True
        super(MyTestSuiteRunner, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

NOTE: As of Django 1.8, DjangoTestSuiteRunner has been deprecated. You should use DiscoverRunner instead:

from django.conf import settings
from django.test.runner import DiscoverRunner


class MyTestSuiteRunner(DiscoverRunner):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        settings.IM_IN_TEST_MODE = True
        super(MyTestSuiteRunner, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Not quite sure about your use case but one way I've seen to detect when the test suite is running is to check if django.core.mail has a outbox attribute such as:

from django.core import mail

if hasattr(mail, 'outbox'):
    # We are in test mode!
    pass
else:
    # Not in test mode...
    pass

This attributed is added by the Django test runner in setup_test_environment and removed in teardown_test_environment. You can check the source here: https://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/test/utils.py

Edit: If you want models defined for testing only then you should check out Django ticket #7835 in particular comment #24 part of which is given below:

Apparently you can simply define models directly in your tests.py. Syncdb never imports tests.py, so those models won't get synced to the normal db, but they will get synced to the test database, and can be used in tests.

I'm using settings.py overrides. I have a global settings.py, which contains most stuff, and then I have overrides for it. Each settings file starts with:

from myproject.settings import settings

and then goes on to override some of the settings.

prod_settings.py - Production settings (e.g. overrides DEBUG=False)
dev_settings.py - Development settings (e.g. more logging)
test_settings.py

And then I can define UNIT_TESTS=False in the base settings.py, and override it to UNIT_TESTS=True in test_settings.py.

Then whenever I run a command, I need to decide which settings to run against (e.g. DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myproject.test_settings ./manage.py test). I like that clarity.

Detect django testing mode

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