A solution to avoid migrations when testing in Django 1.7, the config is set in manage.py so no environment variables have to be set

settings_test_snippet.py

# settings.py

class DisableMigrations(object):

    def __contains__(self, item):
        return True

    def __getitem__(self, item):
        return "notmigrations"


# This would be a subclass of a settings class, in my case Local, i.e. class UnitTests(Local):
class UnitTests:
    
    MIGRATION_MODULES = DisableMigrations()
    
# Add this to manage.py
if 'test' in sys.argv:
    os.environ['DJANGO_CONFIGURATION'] = 'UnitTests'