How do you set DEBUG to True when running a Django test?

Solution 1:

For a specific test inside a test case, you can use the override_settings decorator:

from django.test.utils import override_settings
from django.conf import settings
class TestSomething(TestCase):
    @override_settings(DEBUG=True)
    def test_debug(self):
        assert settings.DEBUG

Solution 2:

Starting with Django 1.11 you can use --debug-mode to set the DEBUG setting to True prior to running tests.

Solution 3:

The accepted answer didn't work for me. I use Selenium for testing, and setting @override_settings(DEBUG=True) makes the test browser always display 404 error on every page. And DEBUG=False does not show exception tracebacks. So I found a workaround.

The idea is to emulate DEBUG=True behaviour, using custom 500 handler and built-in django 500 error handler.

1. Add this to myapp.views:

   import sys
   from django import http
   from django.views.debug import ExceptionReporter
   
   def show_server_error(request):
       """
       500 error handler to show Django default 500 template
       with nice error information and traceback.
       Useful in testing, if you can't set DEBUG=True.
   
       Templates: `500.html`
       Context: sys.exc_info() results
        """
       exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback = sys.exc_info()
       error = ExceptionReporter(request, exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback)
       return http.HttpResponseServerError(error.get_traceback_html())
   

2. urls.py:

   from django.conf import settings
   
   if settings.TESTING_MODE:
       # enable this handler only for testing, 
       # so that if DEBUG=False and we're not testing,
       # the default handler is used
       handler500 = 'myapp.views.show_server_error'
   

3. settings.py:

   # detect testing mode
   import sys
   TESTING_MODE = 'test' in sys.argv
   

Now if any of your Selenium tests encounters 500 error, you'll see a nice error page with traceback and everything. If you run a normal non-testing environment, default 500 handler is used.

Inspired by:

• Where in django is the default 500 traceback rendered so that I can use it to create my own logs?
• django - how to detect test environment