There is one major hitch: doctest. Doctest is an interesting Python library that tests code by comparing it to expected output (by converting the result to a string). The problem is that certain constructs (especially dictionaries) will output differently in different implementation of Python. Thus, because Django relies on doctest, many tests would fail even though they were actually correct, just because the output was different. Thankfully, the Django project is working to get rid of doctest (I smile every time I see one of Alex Gaynor’s “we have always been at war with doctest” commits go in).
I covered the setup of the environment in my post on running the Django tutorial on IronPython, this may be familiar.
First, you'll need to install IronPython. Using the latest (IronPython 2.7 Beta 1 as of this writing) is recommended. The MSI installer is best, but you can use the zip as well. You'll just need to remember where it's unpacked, as you'll need that path later.
Next, you'll need to get Django/IronPython. Because Django requires some IronPython-specific patches, you'll need to download the entire source tree. To do this, you'll need Mercurial (I recommend TortoiseHG). Create an empty directory to work in, as well. I find Mercurial easier to work with from the command line, even with TortoiseHG installed, but you can do all of this from TortoiseHG as well. You’ll also need to enable MQ and, if you’re new to Mercurial, check out this quick tour of bibucket and this great Mercurial tutorial.
To get the Django/IronPython sources, from your empty directory:
> hg qclone http://bitbucket.org/jdhardy/django-ipy-patches django-ironpython > pushd django-ironpython && hg qpush --all && popd > hg clone http://bitbucket.org/jdhardy/django-ironpython-tests > cd django-ironpython-tests
The first line pulls the sources from bitbucket into the 'django-ironpython' folder, the second line applies all of the Django/IronPython patches, and – here’s where it’s different from the tutorial! – the next-to-last line clones the django-ironpython-tests repository, which contains a bunch of helpers for running the Django tests. The last line just switches to the django-ironpython-tests folder.
Now you’ll need to open testenv.cmd in a text editor and possibly make some changes. In particular, change _ipy_root to point to your IronPython installation if you didn’t use the MSI installer.
Now you can run the runtests.cmd file, which will run the entire Django test suite. There will be errors and failures, but the results are promising, with about 66% of the tests passing:
Ran 2595 tests in 3022.324s FAILED (failures=405, errors=468, skipped=16, expected failures=1)