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Using Tox with the Jenkins Integration Server

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tox configuration specification

tox.ini files uses the standard ConfigParser “ini-style” format. Below you find the specification, but you might want to skim some tox configuration and usage examples first and use this page as a reference.

Tox global settings

List of optional global options:

[tox]
minversion=ver    # minimally required tox version
toxworkdir=path   # tox working directory, defaults to {toxinidir}/.tox
setupdir=path     # defaults to {toxinidir}
distdir=path      # defaults to {toxworkdir}/dist
distshare=path    # defaults to {homedir}/.tox/distshare
envlist=ENVLIST   # defaults to the list of all environments

tox autodetects if it is running in a Jenkins context (by checking for existence of the JENKINS_URL environment variable) and will first lookup global tox settings in this section:

[tox:hudson]
...               # override [tox] settings for the hudson context
# note: for hudson distshare defaults to ``{toxworkdir}/distshare``.

envlist setting

Determining the environment list that tox is to operate one happens in this order:

  • command line option -eENVLIST
  • environment variable TOXENV
  • tox.ini file’s envlist

Virtualenv test environment settings

Test environments are defined by a:

[testenv:NAME]
...

section. The NAME will be the name of the virtual environment. Defaults for each setting in this section are looked up in the:

[testenv]
...

testenvironment default section.

Complete list of settings that you can put into testenv* sections:

basepython=NAME-OR-PATH

name or path to a Python interpreter which will be used for creating the virtual environment. default: interpreter used for tox invocation.

commands=ARGVLIST

the commands to be called for testing. Each command is defined by one or more lines; a command can have multiple lines if a line ends with the \ character in which case the subsequent line will be appended (and may contain another \ character ...). For eventually performing a call to subprocess.Popen(args, ...) args are determined by splitting the whole command by whitespace.

changedir=path

change to this working directory when executing the test command. default: {toxinidir}

deps=MULTI-LINE-LIST

test-specific dependencies -.to be installed into the environment prior to project package installation. Each line defines a dependency, which will be passed to easy_install/pip for processing. A line specify a file, an URL or a package name. You can additionally specify an indexserver to use for installing this dependency. All derived dependencies (deps required by the dep) will then be retrieved from the specified indexserver:

deps = :myindexserver:pkg
setenv=MULTI-LINE-LIST

New in version 0.9.

each line contains a NAME=VALUE environment variable setting which will be used for all test command invocations as well as for installing the sdist package into a virtual environment.

recreate=True|False(default)

Always recreate virtual environment if this option is True.

downloadcache=path

(pip only) use this directory for caching downloads - this defaults to the environment variable PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE if it is set. default: no download cache will be used. note: if creating multiple environments use of a download cache greatly speeds up the testing process.

distribute=True|False

Set to False if you want to use setuptools instead of the default distribute in the virtual environment. default: True.

sitepackages=True|False

Set to True if you want to create virtual environments that also have access to globally installed packages. default: False, meaning that virtualenvs will be created with --no-site-packages by default.

args_are_paths=BOOL

treat positional arguments passed to tox as file system paths and - if they exist on the filesystem - rewrite them according to the changedir. default: True (due to the exists-on-filesystem check it’s usually safe to try rewriting).

envtmpdir=path

defines a temporary directory for the virtualenv which will be cleared each time before the group of test commands is invoked. default: {envdir}/tmp

envlogdir=path

defines a directory for logging where tox will put logs of tool invocation. default: {envdir}/log

indexserver

New in version 0.9.

Multi-line name = URL definitions of python package servers. Depedencies can specify using a specified index server through the :indexservername:depname pattern. The default indexserver definition determines where unscoped dependencies and the sdist install installs from. Example:

[tox]
indexserver =
    default = http://mypypi.org

will make tox install all dependencies from this PYPI index server (including when installing the project sdist package).

Substitutions

Any key=value setting in an ini-file can make use of value substitution through the {...} string-substitution pattern.

Globally available substitutions

{toxinidir}
the directory where tox.ini is located
{toxworkdir}
the directory where virtual environments are created and sub directories for packaging reside.
{homedir}
the user-home directory path.
{distdir}
the directory where sdist-packages will be created in
{distshare}
the directory where sdist-packages will be copied to so that they may be accessed by other processes or tox runs.

environment variable substitutions

If you specify a substitution string like this:

{env:KEY}

then the value will be retrieved as os.environ['KEY'] and raise an Error if the environment variable does not exist.

substitutions for positional arguments in commands

New in version 1.0.

If you specify a substitution string like this:

{posargs:DEFAULTS}

then the value will be replaced with positional arguments as provided to the tox command:

tox arg1 arg2

In this instance, the positional argument portion will be replaced with arg1 arg2. If no positional arguments were specified, the value of DEFAULTS will be used instead. If DEFAULTS contains other substitution strings, such as {env:*}, they will be interpreted.,

Use a double -- if you also want to pass options to an underlying test command, for example:

tox -- --opt1 ARG1

will make the --opt1 ARG1 appear in all test commands where [] or {posargs} was specified. By default (see args_are_paths setting), tox rewrites each positional argument if it is a relative path and exists on the filesystem to become a path relative to the changedir setting.

Previous versions of tox supported the [.*] pattern to denote positional arguments with defaults. This format has been deprecated. Use {posargs:DEFAULTS} to specify those.

Substition for values from other sections

New in version 1.4.

Values from other sections can be refered to via:

{[sectionname]valuename}

which you can use to avoid repetition of config values. You can put default values in one section and reference them in others to avoid repeting the same values:

[base]
deps =
    pytest
    mock
    pytest-xdist

[testenv:dulwich]
deps =
    dulwich
    {[base]deps}

[testenv:mercurial]
dep =
    mercurial
    {[base]deps}

Other Rules and notes

  • path specifications: if a specified path is a relative path it will be considered as relative to the toxinidir, the directory where the configuration file resides.