manage.py test does not work if there is not a model.py in the application

[cmgreen@…]

I have a project where I am not using any models. My appdir looked like

   app/views.py
   app/__init__.py
   app/tests.py

I created a tests.py and the get_apps would fail to find the application, even though it was listed under installed apps. When running ./manage.py test app, it would fail saying there was no application with that label.

[mir@…]

I could reproduce this.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "manage.py", line 11, in ?
    execute_manager(settings)
  File "/home/mir/lib/python/django/core/management.py", line 1459, in execute_manager
    execute_from_command_line(action_mapping, argv)
  File "/home/mir/lib/python/django/core/management.py", line 1382, in execute_from_command_line
    action_mapping[action](args[1:], int(options.verbosity))
  File "/home/mir/lib/python/django/core/management.py", line 1234, in test
    app_list = [get_app(app_label) for app_label in app_labels]
  File "/home/mir/lib/python/django/db/models/loading.py", line 46, in get_app
    raise ImproperlyConfigured, "App with label %s could not be found" % app_label
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: App with label testapp could not be found

[medhat]

I created a patch for this, but I did not create tests... (I was not really sure how to creat tests for it :-))
If someone is interested in using this and add the tests instead of starting from scratch, that would be great.

[medhat]

this should replace the previous patch

[njharman <njharman@…>]

This problem has an easy workaround 'touch models.py' in relevant apps.

It can still is a bit of a gotcha though(some of my unittests weren't running for couple months and still wouldn't be if I hadn't added one and noticed the test count not increment). So, I'm working on a minimal patch to resolve this issue.

[Antti Kaihola]

There's an overlapping patch for the problem of testing models in separate files in #5751. It would make sense to merge these patches.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Duplicate of #7198. Even though this is the earlier ticket, I'm closing this one because #7198 describes a more general problem.