See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13705328/ -- I was looking for a way to run Selenium tests for a Django app on a staging server hosted on Heroku using a PostgreSQL database. The DjangoTestSuiteRunner creates and destroys the whole database before/after testing, which would not work on Heroku where databases are added via other means (her…

settings.py

import dj_database_url

TEST_DATABASES = {
    'default': dj_database_url.config(env='TEST_DATABASE_URL')
}

# replace path below to point to HerokuTestSuiteRunner class
TEST_RUNNER = 'python.path.to.test_suite_runner.HerokuTestSuiteRunner'

test_suite_runner.py

"""
To use this, run:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev
heroku config:set TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres://..." # replace with the new HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_<COLOR>_URL

Then, make TEST_RUNNER setting a Python path to the HerokuTestSuiteRunner class.
"""

import django
from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management import call_command
from django.db.utils import ConnectionHandler

class HerokuTestSuiteRunner(DjangoTestSuiteRunner):
    def setup_databases(self, **kwargs):
        ###
        # WARNING: NOT handling 'TEST_MIRROR', 'TEST_DEPENDENCIES'
        ###

        # get new connections to test database
        test_connections = ConnectionHandler(settings.TEST_DATABASES)

        for alias in django.db.connections:
            test_connection = test_connections[alias]

            # set django-wide connection to use test connection
            django.db.connections[alias] = test_connection

            # re-initialize database (this "replaces" the CREATE DATABASE which
            # cannot be issued on Heroku)
            cursor = test_connection.cursor()
            cursor.execute('DROP SCHEMA public CASCADE')
            cursor.execute('CREATE SCHEMA public')

            # code below taken from
            # django.test.simple.DjangoTestSuiteRunner.setup_databases and
            # django.db.backends.creation.create_test_db

            # make them tables
            call_command('syncdb',
                        verbosity=0,
                        interactive=False,
                        database=test_connection.alias,
                        load_initial_data=False)

            call_command('flush',
                verbosity=0,
                interactive=False,
                database=test_connection.alias)

            from django.core.cache import get_cache
            from django.core.cache.backends.db import BaseDatabaseCache
            for cache_alias in settings.CACHES:
                cache = get_cache(cache_alias)
                if isinstance(cache, BaseDatabaseCache):
                    call_command('createcachetable', cache._table,
                                 database=test_connection.alias)

    def teardown_databases(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # NOP
        pass

Hi, thank you for your code! I'm getting this error on Heroku:

raise ImproperlyConfigured("You need to specify NAME in your Django settings file.")
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: You need to specify NAME in your Django settings file.

Copied your file and added this to settings:

TEST_DATABASES = {
'default': dj_database_url.config(env='TEST_DATABASE_URL')
}

TEST_RUNNER = 'test_tools.test_suite_runner.HerokuTestSuiteRunner'

added a test_tools module with test_suite_runner.py in it.

heroku config shows TEST_DATABASE_URL to the correct db.

Any ideas why?

Nevermind...TEST_DATABASE_URL was improperly configured.

My confusion came from here:

heroku config:set TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres://..." # replace with the new HEROKU_POSTGRESQL__URL

I added like this:

heroku config:set TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres://HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GOLD_URL"

Had to do heroku config

copied the HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GOLD_URL value and changed it in TEST_DATABASE_URL...worked like a charm

Hi @nitochi -- sorry I didn't see your comment. Your fix is correct.

Were you able to run your tests on Heroku?

Cheers

See jazzband/django-nose#175

Usefrom django.test.runner import DiscoverRunner instead of
from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner

A few minor changes for Django 1.9 (in addition to the change pointed out by jkevintu):

• syncdb is deprecated and should be replaced with migrate
• get_cache is deprecated, import caches instead, then replace get_cache(cache_alias) with caches[cache_alias]