Unit testing GAE apps within a virtualenv

I recently ran into an issue when trying to run my usual nosetests against a newly created GAE-based app:

ImportError: No module named google.appengine.api

The SDK installs outside of Python shared modules and obviously has no idea about any virtualenv that you've set up in your project directory. The way I have my project set up is:

+ root
  + src
    +- app.yaml
    + [linked pip installed packages]
    + [module]
      +- tests.py 
  + env
  +- [virtualenv]

Adding GAE package directories to a gae.pth file in [virtualenv]/lib/site-packages did the trick for me and I was able to run unit tests without jumping through nose plugin or custom test runner hoops:

gae.pth:

/path/to/google_appengine
/path/to/google_appengine/lib/yaml/lib
/path/to/google_appengine/lib/fancy_urllib

Of course, this list will grow as you add tests that depend on more SDK modules.

Following Google's local unit testing documentation (service stubs, etc.) got everything else set up just fine for me.

Admittedly, I'm running on Windows 7 and not my OS of choice. However, the solution should translate just fine to a Linux/Mac machine as well.

Running Django unit tests

Not being a DBA, or someone who's even really familiar with database administration, I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get unit tests running on my dev box. I'd checked a few posts on SO, but it seems that I'd missed the one most important thing: RTFM.

Got an error creating the test database: permission denied to create database

If you're seeing the above error when running ./manage.py test, read on..

As Django creates and destroys a database when running unit tests, the user that you're using to connect to the server with needs to have permissions to create databases. This cannot be done by granting superuser permissions to the database user (within postgres of course) as the user needs to have database creation by default (you have to SET ROLE when using this method). To grant permissions to create a database by default, you should do this when creating the user account within psql:

create user myuser createdb

No more issues running unit tests.