Django framework  provides integrated tests runner, which can be started by ./manage/py test (see docs for more details, key advantage of this runner is that it’ll create new empty database for tests, so they do not interfere with each other or your development instance).   This tests runner runs unit tests from tests.py or models.py modules in active projects.  However in larger projects we would like to have other organization of tests code –   have for instance special test package within project that  contains many testing modules, each focused on particular aspect of the application.

This simple code in tests.py will assure that test cases are auto-discovered from test_cases package within the project:

import os
import re
import importlib
import unittest
from django import test

TESTS_DIR='test_cases'

curr_dir=os.path.split(__file__)[0]
tests_dir=os.path.join(curr_dir, TESTS_DIR)

def is_test_case(cls):
    return issubclass(cls, unittest.TestCase ) and cls!= unittest.TestCase and cls!=test.TestCase

files=os.listdir(tests_dir)
for f in files:
    m=re.match('^test.*\.py$', f, re.IGNORECASE)
    mod_name=os.path.splitext(f)[0]

    if m:
        mod=importlib.import_module(os.path.basename(curr_dir)+'.'+TESTS_DIR+'.'+mod_name)
        for name in dir(mod):
            mbr=getattr(mod, name)
            if isinstance(mbr, type) and is_test_case(mbr):
                globals()[name]=mbr
                print 'Found test case', name

This code imports all test cases (classes that inherit from unittest.TestCase) from any module that starts with “test” (within test_cases package)  into the tests module, so django runner can find them here.