Question

I want to be able to use an existing test database to run my tests against and not have Django create and delete a database every time I want to run the tests. Is this possible?

Answer 1

It’s possible, here is a way :

1) Define your own test runner look here to see how.

2) For your custom test runner look in the default test runner, you can just copy and past the code and just comment this line : connection.creation.destroy_test_db(old_name, verbosity) which is responsible for destroying the test database, and i think you should put the connection.creation.create_test_db(..) line in a try except something like this maybe:

try:
    # Create the database the first time.
    connection.creation.create_test_db(verbosity, autoclobber=not interactive) 
except ..: # Look at the error that this will raise when create a database that already exist
    # Test database already created.
    pass 

3) Bound TEST_RUNNER in setting.py to your test runner.

4) Now run your test like this: ./manage.py test