[Django]-Django/Travis CI – configuring a .travis YAML file to first start a localhost server, then run my tests without hanging?

So silly me, after fighting for almost two days straight I figured it out. Dead simple answer and I feel stupid but I’ll post it here just in case someone else who doesn’t do more than simple stuff with the linux shell stumbles upon it.
I appended an ampersand to the end of the python manage.py runserver line (I’m assuming this tells the os to run this as a separate job, or to run it and proceed to the next task) and kept it in the before_script section. So the end of the .yml file looks like:

before_script:
  python manage.py runserver &

script:
  coverage run manage.py tests
  coverage run functional_tests.py

after_script:
  coveralls