It’s occasionally useful to be able to create a Django model class in your unit test suite. Let’s say you’re building a library which creates an abstract model which your users will want to subclass. There’s no need for your library to subclass it, but your library should still test that you can create a subclass and test out its features. If you create that model in your models.py file, then Django will think that it is a real part of your library and load it whenever you (or your users) call syncdb. That’s bad.

The solution is to create it in a tests.py file within your Django app. If it’s not in models.py, Django won’t load it during syncdb.

from django.db import models
from django.test import TestCase

from .models import MyAbstractModel

class MyTestModel(MyAbstractModel):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20)

class AbstractTest(TestCase):
    def test_my_test_model(self):
        self.assertTrue(MyTestModel.objects.create(name='foo'))

A problem with this solution is that I rarely use a single tests.py file. Instead we use multiple test files collected in a tests package. If you try to create a model in tests/test_foo.py, then this approach fails because Django tries to create the model in an application named tests, but there is no such app in INSTALLED_APPS. The solution is to set app_label to the name of your app in an inner Meta class.

from django.db import models
from django.test import TestCase

from ..models import MyAbstractModel

class MyTestModel(MyAbstractModel):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20)

    class Meta:
        app_label = 'myappname'

class AbstractTest(TestCase):
    def test_my_test_model(self):
        self.assertTrue(MyTestModel.objects.create(name='foo'))

Oh, and I almost forgot… if you use South, this might not work, unless you set SOUTH_TESTS_MIGRATE to False in your settings file.

Comments and corrections welcome!