Django testing database for multiple developers

Question

Our development database (MariaDB in this case) is on a server and the dev db instance is shared among multiple developers working on their local desktops. If we all run the Django tests (manage.py tests) at the same time, would there potentially be collisions where the local test runners would create/delete the same objects in the test db instance?

I'm assuming each developer is supposed to have their own local database so that they are testing in isolation before deploying changes to a server?

This is running on Django 1.11.

Answer 1

If your team all are pointing to the same database host in your settings, then yes that could potentially lead to collisions and issues. However, Django allows you to specify settings for test databases. So, each of your team can locally set their own settings for testing to prevent this. This answer to a related question has a good explanation of what I mean.

Code snippet in case above link breaks: Django 1.10+

DATABASES = {
    'default':{
        'ENGINE':'mysql',
        'NAME':'testsqldb',
        'USER':'<username>',
        'PASSWORD':'<password>',
        'TEST': {
            'NAME': 'auto_tests',
        }
    }
}