Disable migrations when running unit tests in Django 1.7

Question

Django 1.7 introduced database migrations.

When running the unit tests in Django 1.7, it forces a migrate, that takes a long time. So I would like to skip the django migrations, and create the database in the final state.

I know that ignoring the migrations can be a bad practice, as that part of the code would not be tested. But that's not the case: I'm running the full migrations in the CI test server (jenkins). I only want to skip the migrations in my local tests, where the speed matters.

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Some context:

Until Django 1.6, when using South, I used the SOUTH_TESTS_MIGRATE setting:

By default, South’s syncdb command will also apply migrations if it’s run in non-interactive mode, which includes when you’re running tests - it will run every migration every time you run your tests.

If you want the test runner to use syncdb instead of migrate - for example, if your migrations are taking way too long to apply - simply set SOUTH_TESTS_MIGRATE = False in settings.py.

However, syncdb does not exist anymore, now it's migrate.

And from Django 1.8 I'll use the --keepdb parameter:

The --keepdb option can be used to preserve the test database between test runs. This has the advantage of skipping both the create and destroy actions which greatly decreases the time to run tests, especially those in a large test suite. If the test database does not exist, it will be created on the first run and then preserved for each subsequent run. Any unapplied migrations will also be applied to the test database before running the test suite.

So this question is limited to Django 1.7.

Answer 1

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}