Unit testing with django-celery?

Question

I am trying to come up with a testing methodology for our django-celery project. I have read the notes in the documentation, but it didn't give me a good idea of what to actually do. I am not worried about testing the tasks in the actual daemons, just the functionality of my code. Mainly I am wondering:

1. How can we bypass task.delay() during the test (I tried setting CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER = True but it made no difference)?
2. How do we use the test settings that are recommended (if that is the best way) without actually changing our settings.py?
3. Can we still use manage.py test or do we have to use a custom runner?

Overall any hints or tips for testing with celery would be very helpful.

Answer 1

I like to use the override_settings decorator on tests which need celery results to complete.

from django.test import TestCase
from django.test.utils import override_settings
from myapp.tasks import mytask

class AddTestCase(TestCase):

    @override_settings(CELERY_EAGER_PROPAGATES_EXCEPTIONS=True,
                       CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=True,
                       BROKER_BACKEND='memory')
    def test_mytask(self):
        result = mytask.delay()
        self.assertTrue(result.successful())

If you want to apply this to all tests you can use the celery test runner as described at http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/2.5/django/unit-testing.html which basically sets these same settings except (BROKER_BACKEND = 'memory').

In settings:

TEST_RUNNER = 'djcelery.contrib.test_runner.CeleryTestSuiteRunner'

Look at the source for CeleryTestSuiteRunner and it's pretty clear what's happening.