Organizing Django Tests into Folders

Update: Due to some strange Django error, Django will refuse to run your app’s tests if your application doesn’t have a models.py file. You’ll need to create an empty models.pyin your app’s folder if you don’t have one

Django comes with a nice testing  rig that lets you individually test each app.  By using a combination of pyunit & Django’s testing tools, you’ll be able to whip up a testing suite for each of your site’s apps (more information here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/)

However there is some strangeness as to how Django expects the tests to be organized. From the Django documentation:

For a given Django application, the test runner looks
for doctests in two places:

    * The models.py file. You can define module-level doctests and/or
      a doctest for individual models. It's common practice to put
      application-level doctests in the module docstring and model-level
      doctests in the model docstrings.
    * A file called tests.py in the application directory
      -- i.e., the directory that holds models.py. This file is a
      hook for any and all doctests you want to write that aren't
      necessarily related to models.

Which sounds simple enough, until you end up with a bloated tests.py file that covers 5 different aspects of your app.

Now wouldn’t it be great if you could split them into different files and group them into a folder?

Putting your Tests into a Folder

1. In your app’s folder, create a new folder called tests
2. Break up your tests.py file into “logical” (what that exactly means is up to you ) python files. Remember to add in the import statements for each file
3. Move your new files into the tests folder
4. In tests, create a new file __init__.py
5. You want to modify your __init__.py as such:

   from [Project Name].[App Name].tests.[filename] import *
   
   #starts the test suite
   __test__= {
              'mytest': [filename]
              }

   Note that the filename’s  .py extension should be excluded from [filename]!

6. And that’s it! Just follow those basic rules to add all your new test files to __init__.py.
You can go ahead and delete the original tests.py file now as well. Happy testing!