Comment by Evgeny for I managed to get a test run that seems more promising by modifying the manage.py of the dummy project with the follow code after the import sections:import sys, os if 'DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE' not in os.environ: os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'dev.settings' # <-- name of my dummy project if 'test' in sys.argv: sys.path.append('.') from dev import settings # <-- my dev project's settings module here settings.LIVESETTINGS_OPTIONS = { settings.SITE_ID: {'SETTINGS': {'EXTERNAL_KEYS': { 'RECAPTCHA_SECRET': 'xxx' } } } } from django.test.utils import setup_test_environment, teardown_test_environment setup_test_environment() if 'south' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS: from south.management.commands import patch_for_test_db_setup patch_for_test_db_setup() from django.db import connection connection.creation.create_test_db(1, True) The test suites seems to be taking quite long time to run on my machine even with an sqlite3 :memory: database, but I suppose that's to be expected. I'll let it run through when I get time. It does seem to throw occasional failures, though.SOUTH setup in test environments from my fork of django-pytest.

We use development version of South right now as there was some issue with a released one, never heard of django-pytest... The workaround looks interesting, but not sure too many hacks can stand on top of each other:).