Running django unit tests from shell with ipython notebook has strange behavior

Question

I'm using an ipyhton notebook connected to Django shell to run some tests. I am on django 1.4.

First, if I run as configured below sometimes it works perfectly and other times, it just hangs with no output and no errors. I have to completely kill the ipyhton kernel and close all notebooks and try again (when the hang event occurs, all open notebooks stop working)

If i inherit from unittest.TestCase instead of django.test.TestCase it works perfect every time. However, I need the latter so i can use the django's TestCase.client in my actual tests.

NOTE: In both cases I am skipping the test database because I'm getting a failure on a missing celery database. I will cross that bridge at another time.

The notebook:

from django.utils import unittest
from django.test import TestCase
from django.test.utils import setup_test_environment
from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner


class MyTestCase(TestCase):
    def test_001(self):
        print "ok"
    def test_002(self):
        self.assertEqual(True , True)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    setup_test_environment()
    runner = DjangoTestSuiteRunner(verbosity=1, interactive=True, failfast=True)
    suite = unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(MyTestCase)
    #old_config = runner.setup_databases()
    result = runner.run_suite(suite)
    #runner.teardown_databases(old_config)
    runner.suite_result(suite, result)

Answer 1

In my case, I just created a test_runner function that accepts a test_class parameter, like this:

def test_runner(test_class):
    from django.utils import unittest
    from django.test.utils import setup_test_environment
    from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner
    setup_test_environment()
    runner = DjangoTestSuiteRunner(verbosity=1, interactive=True, failfast=True)
    suite = unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(test_class)
    result = runner.run_suite(suite)
    runner.suite_result(suite, result)

After that, you could just run:

test_runner(MyTestCase)

in ipython notebook.

Make sure to use the one that's provided by django-extensions, by running:

manage.py shell_plus --notebook

Hope that helps.