Django only allows you to specify one database, and although a new database is created for unittests, it still uses most of the same settings (auto prepending “test_” to the database name), which means a Django install using MySQL also uses MySQL for unittests.

To get around this problem, I created a file in my project root called test_settings.py containing the following lines:

I then opened my settings.py, imported sys, and inserted the following lines at the end of the file:

If one of the command line arguments is “test”, that means a unittest is being run, in which case Django will attempt to import test_settings.py, which will override the database settings and use Sqlite instead. Migrations won’t be an issue, since Django South uses the old syncdb command for generating databases for unittests.

Hope this helps you save some time testing.