When writing tests in Django apps, I have an urge to reuse code in setUp() across all tests (most of my apps use the same setUp). So I come up with a GlobalSetup class that other tests should inherit from (it’s located at the project level). However, this approach creates a problem with loading fixtures. According to Django docs:

Once you’ve created a fixture and placed it in a fixtures directory in one of your INSTALLED_APPS, you can use it in your unit tests by specifying a fixtures class attribute on your django.test.TestCase subclass

And you would normally do this to load the fixtures:

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from django.test import TestCase

class PoniesTest(TestCase):
    fixtures = ['ponies']

    def test_ponies(self):
        call_some_test_code()

How should we load the fixtures now, when the test file is not at the apps level? Instead of creating fixures folder and placing fixtures in them (in every app), a better and neater way to handle this would be to put all fixtures in one folder at the project level and load them. You can do this with call_command as following:

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from django.test import TestCase
from django.core.management import call_command

class GlobalSetup(self):
    # Create some ponies and snakes here
    def setUp(self):
        # Load fixtures
        call_command('loaddata', 'tests/ponies', verbosity=0)

Invoking this call_command is equivalent to running manage.py loaddata /path/to/fixtures The test in each app can now inherit GlocalSetup and reuse setUp():

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from project.tests import GlobalSetup

class PoniesTest(GlobalSetup):
    def setUp(self):
        super(PoniesTest, self).setUp()

    def test_ponies(self):
        call_some_test_code()

You could also limit each test to load different fixtures by passing a list of fixtures name ['ponies', 'snakes'] to setUp(). Hope this will help you to DRY up your tests.