How to run django unit-tests on production database in Python

Question

i'm starting the TDD development attitude and am writting unit-tests for my django application. I'm aware of fixtures and know that's the way tests should be executed, but for a given test I do need to execute it on the whole database, and json fixture for 10+ million row database is not something i'd like to handle, moreover, this test is "read-only".

So the question is how are you setting up your test suites to run on the production database?

Answer 1

In case someone googles here searching for the solution for a given problem, here is the skeleton on how to perform unit tests on django production database. Check the django docs section for the file/directory structure, and instructions on where to put the given code. It should go in yourapp/management/commands/newcommandname.py, and both the management and commands folders should contain empty __init__.py files which makes python treat them as valid modules.

The test suite can by run as:

$python manage.py newcommandname