Django Unit Testing taking a very long time to create test database

The final solution that fixes my problem is to force Django to disable migration during testing, which can be done from the settings like this

TESTING = 'test' in sys.argv[1:]
if TESTING:
    print('=========================')
    print('In TEST Mode - Disableling Migrations')
    print('=========================')

    class DisableMigrations(object):

        def __contains__(self, item):
            return True

        def __getitem__(self, item):
            return None

    MIGRATION_MODULES = DisableMigrations()

or use https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-test-without-migrations

My whole test now takes about 1 minute and a small app takes 5 seconds.

In my case, migrations are not needed for testing as I update tests as I migrate, and don’t use migrations to add data. This won’t work for everybody