How do you put a file in a fixture in Django?

Question

I can easily fill the field of a FileField or ImageField in a Django fixture with a file name, but that file doesn\'t exist and when I try to test my application it fails becaus

Answer 1

There's no way to "include" the files in the serialized fixture. If creating a test fixture, you just need to do it yourself; make sure that some test files actually exist in locations referenced by the FileField/ImageField values. The values of those fields are paths relative to MEDIA_ROOT: if you need to, you can set MEDIA_ROOT in your test setUp() method in a custom test_settings.py to ensure that your test files are found wherever you put them.

EDIT: If you want to do it in your setUp() method, you can also monkeypatch default_storage directly:

from django.core.files.storage import default_storage

class MyTest(TestCase):

  def setUp(self):
    self._old_default_storage_location = default_storage.location
    default_storage.location = '/some/other/place'

  def tearDown(self):
    default_storage.location = self._old_default_storage_location

That seems to work. default_storage is a documented public API, so this should be reliable.