"Database access not allowed" in Doctests (Django)

[acjackson]

I'm trying to get database access (django) in a few of my doctests with

pytestmark = pytest.mark.django_db

or

@pytest.mark.django_db

But I keep getting the following error:

Failed: Database access not allowed, use the "django_db" mark to enable it.

Is Django database access supported in doctests?
My other unittests using the Django database work fine.

I use
pytest 1.8.2.dev1 (#1057)
pytest-django==2.9.1
Django==1.8

[nicoddemus]

IIRC doc tests currently can't be marked with pytest marks, so unless you can enable database access somehow using fixture's and the getfixture API, I'm afraid there's no solution currently.

Perhaps you could create an issue at pytest-dev/pytest-django to see if there are any known workarounds?

[acjackson]

I tested some more and noticed this: some of the doctests, which are requiring a database connection, run successfully on console, but fail in PyCharm. I could not determine, why some tests run and some don't.

I'm now converting my doctests to unittests, which is probably a better practice and causes less problems.

[nicoddemus]

That's strange, probably some weird interaction with PyCharm's pytest runner (although I'm a PyCharm user and never experienced any problems). Feel free to reopen this if you happen to have new info.

[pbx]

Sorry to drop a comment on a six-year-old closed issue, but I'm facing this problem currently and am still looking for a fix.

• Django 3.2.x
• pytest 6.2.5
• pytest-django 4.4.0

My tests were originally inside docstrings in my codebase, but when the recommended decorators didn't help them pass, I extracted them into a standalone .txt file.

Sanitized output showing the error in response to pytest tests.txt:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<doctest tests.txt[2]>", line 1, in <module>
  File "models.py", line 611, in save
    super(Foo, self).save(force_insert=force_insert, using=using)
...
  File "django/db/backends/base/base.py", line 235, in _cursor
    self.ensure_connection()
  File "pytest_django/plugin.py", line 714, in _blocking_wrapper
    raise RuntimeError(
RuntimeError: Database access not allowed, use the "django_db" mark, or the "db" or "transactional_db" fixtures to enable it.