[Answered ]-Django-nose test case gives assertion error when run from management command

It looks like it’s not inheriting the base test class, so it’s not calling the setup method prior to your test. I would recommend inheriting from Django’s TestCase class, as per the Django documentation on testing. In this case, it would look like this:

# write code to test the views.
from django.test import Client
import unittest

# import nose for tests.
import nose.tools as noz

class TestSettings(unittest.TestCase):
    """ test the nose test related setup """

    def setUp(self):  # Note that the unittest requires this to be setUp and not setup
        self.client = Client()

    def testTestUser(self):
        """ Tests if the django user 'test' is setup properly."""
        # login the test user
        response = self.client.login(username=u'test', password=u'test')    
        noz.assert_equal(response, True)

Are you creating a user with username test and password test for your tests? Or loading fixtures? I bet not.

When you are using the shell you are logging in against the database in your settings.py. When you are in a test you are using your test database, which is empty at the beginning of every test, so there are no users.

In setUp you could create a user

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
User.objects.create('test', 'test@test.com', 'test')

As @Kevin London pointed out too

your setup command should be

setUp, but I don’t think that has much to do with it since each TestCase has a client by default.