How do I run a test in Django using production data (Read only)?
Don't do that. You must use the setUp of your test to construct your situation to test. Don't use fixtures also because you have to maintain them, in future you'll change your model and your fixtures must be updated too. This is very annoying.
If you do a good unit test you can mock your models and test the functions you want to test. I do that often when I want to test a method.
If you need you can create some utility function to help you setup the situation you need to create the models and related models to construct the env you want to test.
I would like to run a test in Django but in order to run the test I need access to data from the production database (I don't want to setup an entirely new database for testing).
How can use this data from the production database without allowing write access in my script? I don't want this test to effect anything, but I need access to this data in order to run this test. It seems ridiculous to have to launch (and pay for) an entirely new database just to grab a few rows of data, any advice?