What you're looking for is called "test discovery", and you don't need to do it manually.
If you want to write a standalone script that runs your tests, you can simply invoke Django's test runner manually from Python code after configuring. The process for this is:
# First you need settings.
# You can do this by setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE:
import os
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'path.to.your.settings')
# Or you can do it manually:
SETTINGS_DICT = {
# Put all the settings you'll need in here...
}
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(**SETTINGS_DICT)
import django
django.setup()
import sys
# Now you can run tests:
from django.test.utils import get_runner
TestRunner = get_runner(settings)
test_runner = TestRunner(verbosity=2, interactive=True)
failures = test_runner.run_tests(
['test_module_to_look_in']
)
sys.exit(bool(failures))