The Django documentation (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/testing/#running-tests) says that you can run individual test cases by specifying them:

$ ./manage.py test animals.AnimalTestCase

This assumes that you have your tests in a tests.py file in your Django application. If this is true, then this command works like expected.

I have my tests for a Django application in a tests directory:

my_project/apps/my_app/
├── __init__.py
├── tests
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── field_tests.py
│   ├── storage_tests.py
├── urls.py
├── utils.py
└── views.py

The tests/__init__.py file has a suite() function:

import unittest

from my_project.apps.my_app.tests import field_tests, storage_tests

def suite():
    tests_loader = unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromModule
    test_suites = []
    test_suites.append(tests_loader(field_tests))
    test_suites.append(tests_loader(storage_tests))
    return unittest.TestSuite(test_suites)

To run the tests I do:

$ ./manage.py test my_app

Trying to specify an individual test case raises an exception:

$ ./manage.py test my_app.tests.storage_tests.StorageTestCase
...
ValueError: Test label 'my_app.tests.storage_tests.StorageTestCase' should be of the form app.TestCase or app.TestCase.test_method

I tried to do what the exception message said:

$ ./manage.py test my_app.StorageTestCase
...
ValueError: Test label 'my_app.StorageTestCase' does not refer to a test

How do I specify an individual test case when my tests are in multiple files?

Checkout django-nose. It allows you to specify tests to run like:

python manage.py test another.test:TestCase.test_method

or as noted in comments, use the syntax:

python manage.py test another.test.TestCase.test_method

Since Django 1.6 you can run a complete test case, or single test, using the complete dot notation for the element you want to run.

Automatic test discovery will now find tests in any file that starts with test under the working directory, so addressing the question you would have to rename your files, but you can now keep them inside the directory you want. If you want to use custom file names you can specify a pattern (default Django test runner) with the option flag --pattern="my_pattern_*.py".

So if you are in your manage.py directory and want to run the test test_a inside TestCase subclass A inside a file tests.py under the app/module example you would do:

python manage.py test example.tests.A.test_a

If you don’t want to include a dependency and are in Django 1.6 or later that’s how you do it.

See the Django documentation for more information

I was having this problem myself and found this question, in case anyone else comes along, here was what I dug up. The DjangoTestSuiteRuner uses a method called build_test(label) that figures out what test cases to run based on the label. Looking into this method it turns out they’re doing a getattr() on either the “models” or “test” module. This means if you return a suite the test runner isn’t looking for your test cases in that suite, it only looks in one of those modules.

A quick work-around is to use __init__.py to import your tests directly instead of defining a suite. The makes them part of the “test” module and so build_test(label) can find them.

For your example above, tests/__init__.py should simply contain:

from field_tests import *
from storage_tests import *

This isn’t very elegant and of course if you’re trying to do something more complicated with your suite then this won’t work, but it would for this case.

This should work-

python manage.py test my_app.tests.storage_tests

I also ran into this problem and instead of using django-nose I followed this link here: http://www.pioverpi.net/2010/03/10/organizing-django-tests-into-folders/. You need to open you init.py and import your tests.

Ex in init.py: from unique_test_file import *

Put this code in your __init__.py and it will import all test classes in the package and subpackages. This will allow you to run specific tests without manually importing every file.

import pkgutil
import unittest

for loader, module_name, is_pkg in pkgutil.walk_packages(__path__):
    module = loader.find_module(module_name).load_module(module_name)
    for name in dir(module):
        obj = getattr(module, name)
        if isinstance(obj, type) and issubclass(obj, unittest.case.TestCase):
            exec ('%s = obj' % obj.__name__)

Similarly, for your test suite you can simply use:

def suite():   
    return unittest.TestLoader().discover("appname.tests", pattern="*.py")

Now all you have to do for new tests is write them and make sure they are in the tests folder. No more tedious maintenance of the imports!