testing django app with legacy database - how to avoid recreating db per test?

Question

I'm building web-application using Django1.1 framework with imposed database schema and data (in fact - db already exists - Postgresql). I wrote models already, now I want to perform some unit-testing.

The problem: test runner destroys and reconstructs (using information from models) database after every test method, but that's undesirable. I'd like to preserve at least schema all the time, data cleaning is acceptable. Is there a good way to obtain this behaviour?

(one solution is to use pure unittest module, setting/cleaning everything manually, but that's unsatisfactory)

Answer 1

This doesn't give you the behavior you're asking for, just a potential alternate behavior:

While I deploy and run integration tests against my actual legacy database, I run unit tests against a SQLite database. It's a small configuration change switching the DB engine to get it working. It ends up being faster and avoids clobbering any other work I'm doing.

Answer 2

After some re-googling (first attempt was several weeks ago and just couldn't find this, because it appeared a month ago) I've found this topic, which leads me to django-test-utils; persistent database test runner (e.g. python manage.py quicktest) solves my case (in addition, it seems to be good app in general). In addition, I had to tweak TEST_DATABASE_NAME option in settings.py to my main database to fit my needs.