Path issues, dependent on global test case run vs specific test module run

The setup for my current project is that the project root directory has a certain name, and there is a directory within the root, of the same name, which in turn contains all the app directories. So:

/path/to/project_name/ /path/to/project_name/project_name/ /path/to/project_name/project_name/app_1/ /path/to/project_name/project_name/app_2/ /path/to/project_name/project_name/app_3/

And so on. When I run:

REUSE_DB=1 ./manage.py test

It passes many tests, but fails whenever the test case calls reverse():

File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 476, in reverse
  return iri_to_uri(resolver._reverse_with_prefix(view, prefix, *args, **kwargs))
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 363, in _reverse_with_prefix
  possibilities = self.reverse_dict.getlist(lookup_view)
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 276, in reverse_dict
  self._populate()
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 242, in _populate
  for pattern in reversed(self.url_patterns):
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 328, in url_patterns
  patterns = getattr(self.urlconf_module, "urlpatterns", self.urlconf_module)
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 323, in urlconf_module
  self._urlconf_module = import_module(self.urlconf_name)
File "<virtual_env_path>/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/utils/importlib.py", line 41, in import_module
  __import__(name)

ImportError: No module named urls

Doing some debugging, it looks like it’s failing when trying to import “project_name.urls”. I realized that it was getting confused, because /path/to/project_name/urls.py doesn’t exist, but /path/to/project_name/project_name/urls.py does. If I rename the first “project_name” directory (which my teammates prefer not to do), it fixes it:

/path/to/blah/project_name/app_1 /path/to/blah/project_name/urls.py

And so forth.

Interestingly, the problem ALSO goes away (without renaming anything) when I run a specific test module:

REUSE_DB=1 ./manage.py test project_name.app_1.tests

I tried looking at the offending import line. The name it’s importing, and the sys.path at that point, are identical. Even in the sense of basic Python, I don’t understand how this is possible, but maybe there’s something I don’t understand about the importing process.

Is this a bug in Django Nose? In either case, is there something else I could try with the sys.path that I’m missing?

Thanks.

[lingster]

I had a similar problem, when running unittests with nose in django 1.11, some of my tests were failing with: No Module Named xyz.urls my workaround was to add the following in settings.py, ie amended my ROOT_URLCONF from xyz.urls to xyz.xyz.urls

import sys
TESTING = sys.argv[1:2] == ['test']
if TESTING:
    ROOT_URLCONF = 'xyz.xyz.urls'
else:
    ROOT_URLCONF = 'xyz.urls'

hope this might be of use to others who have similar problems

[jwhitlock]

I believe this goes away with the Django 1.4 project layout. I’ll re-open if someone is still bit by this in 1.4+.