How to run Django without a database

Django is an all-in one solution for building interactive web sites. It's very good for a typical setup with a web server and a database. But what if you don't need a database, for example if you get all the data through external services? Or if you're using Django with a NoSQL database, not using Django's built-in support for data models?

It is possible to run Django without setting up a database. In settings.py, just set DATABASES to an empty dictionary:

DATABASES = {}

Much of the default functionality in Django expects there to be a database. The following common applications will not work with this configuration because they require a database:

• auth
• contenttypes
• sites

These applications have to be disabled.

The following applications can be used without a database:

• sessions: Can be configured to use a file or the cache instead of the database.
• messages: Does not use any storage directly, but depends on sessions by default. This can be configured though.
• staticfiles: Does not use the database.

The only problem left is that Django's test runner sets up a database when you run the command manage.py test. It is simple to disable that behaviour.

Just create the file testing.py with the following contents:

"""Support for testing."""

from django.test.simple import DjangoTestSuiteRunner

class DatabaselessTestRunner(DjangoTestSuiteRunner):
    """A test suite runner that does not set up and tear down a database."""

    def setup_databases(self):
        """Overrides DjangoTestSuiteRunner"""
        pass

    def teardown_databases(self, *args):
        """Overrides DjangoTestSuiteRunner"""
        pass

Then in settings.py, make the following setting:

TEST_RUNNER = 'testing.DatabaselessTestRunner'

That's it. Now the test runner will not set up and tear down a database.

Even though you can't use Django's models (the object/relational mapper), you will still need to create a file called models.py in the application directory. This is so the test runner searches for the tests in the corresponding tests.py file. The models.py file can be empty.

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