Provide an explicit setting to skip tests for INSTALLED_APPS

[Lakin Wecker]

When developing an application that depends on thirdparty django libraries, be it apps in contrib, or libraries like south or treebeard, you rarely want to run their tests as part of your normal testing routine. The latest treebeard library has somewhere around 600 tests! And although it's great that it has such extensive tests (yay tabo!) - I rarely want to run them as part of my testing routine. Rather than having to explicitly specify all of my apps everytime I test, a setting that explicitly asks for certain apps to be skipped it much nicer.

I'm attaching a patch that implements just such a setting. The patch has an implementation, tests and updates the documentation.

The patch was made against r13409 - although I marked this as part of SVN - it would be awesome to see this released in the current releases - of course, I realize that may not be possible.

[Lakin Wecker]

TEST_SKIP_APP_TESTS setting

[Łukasz Rekucki]

This ticket was briefly discussed in this thread: ​http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_frm/thread/ad1b508b879c2e68/27ed8a78c0acaf84?#27ed8a78c0acaf84

[Piotr Czachur]

I completely agree with lakinwecker - it's a need for every Django project I'm in.

[Claude Paroz]

+1 for this setting.

I read Luke's post, but I think that running python manage.py test to just test the appropriate apps in your project would be so much appreciated. Having to write wrappers or custom Test runners for all of my apps is just too cumbersome in my opinion. Because of that, my current (bad) practice is to run tests for a specific app only. Too often I find myself forgetting to run some other app's tests.

[Julien Phalip]

More than once I've found myself wishing there were an --exclude=<app_name> option to the test command, as it is commonly available to a few other commands like dumpdata (​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-option---exclude). Indeed, in many cases I find it's easier to remember the few tests that you want to exclude than the many tests that you want to include. So, I think more versatility for the test command would also be welcome as part of this ticket.

[Ramiro Morales]

Replying to julien:

More than once I've found myself wishing there were an --exclude=<app_name> option to the test command, as it is commonly available to a few other commands like dumpdata (​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-option---exclude). Indeed, in many cases I find it's easier to remember the few tests that you want to exclude than the many tests that you want to include. So, I think more versatility for the test command would also be welcome as part of this ticket.

#8363 is related to that. AFAIK unfortunately this only can be implemented for the runtests.py script, not for the test management command (see ticket:8363#comment:11)

[Claude Paroz]

Replying to julien:

More than once I've found myself wishing there were an --exclude=<app_name> option to the test command, (...)

Sure, but I still favour the setting, to avoid such things like python manage.py test --exclude "django.contrib.auth" --exclude "django.contrib.contenttypes" --exclude "django.contrib.sessions" --exclude "django.contrib.sites" --exclude "south" --exclude "mptt" ...

[Chris Chambers]

For anyone needing a temporary workaround for this issue, ​http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2211/ is useful (note that the setting for excluding apps is TEST_EXCLUDE = [app1, app2]).

[Mitar]

I like the AdvancedTestSuiteRunner approach.

[Carl Meyer]

#17365 is related.

[Aymeric Augustin]

I belive #17365 is the correct answer here, even if it isn't exactly what this ticket asks for.

The long term goal is to deprecate Django's custom test runner, not to extend it.

(Carl, feel free to reopen if you disagree).