Today I wanted to debug some of our unit tests, so I wanted to drop to a shell from inside a test case. Here's how that can be done: import IPython IPython.embed() In previous versions this used to be: from IPython.Shell import IPShellEmbed ipython = IPShellEmbed() ipython() The first two lines go somewhere in your module and the latter wherever you want to hook up with the shell (tests, models, views). This can serve as a more rich alternative to `ipdb.set_trace()`.