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.
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``.
Determining the environment list that tox is to operate on happens in this order:
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:
name or path to a Python interpreter which will be used for creating the virtual environment. default: interpreter used for tox invocation.
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.
each line specifies a command name (in glob-style pattern format) which can be used in the commands section without triggering a “not installed in virtualenv” warning. Example: if you use the unix make for running tests you can list whitelist_externals=make or whitelist_externals=/usr/bin/make if you want more precision. If you don’t want tox to issue a warning in any case, just use whitelist_externals=* which will match all commands (not recommended).
change to this working directory when executing the test command. default: {toxinidir}
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
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.
Always recreate virtual environment if this option is True.
(pip only) use this directory for caching downloads. This value is overriden by the environment variable PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE if it exists. default: no download cache will be used. note: if creating multiple environments use of a download cache greatly speeds up the testing process.
Set to True if you want to use distribute instead of the default setuptools in the virtual environment. Prior to tox-1.5 the default was True and now is False, meaning setuptools is used (note that setuptools-0.7 merged with distribute). In future versions of tox this option might be ignored and setuptools always chosen. default: 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.
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).
defines a temporary directory for the virtualenv which will be cleared each time before the group of test commands is invoked. default: {envdir}/tmp
defines a directory for logging where tox will put logs of tool invocation. default: {envdir}/log
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).
Any key=value setting in an ini-file can make use of value substitution through the {...} string-substitution pattern.
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.
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.
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}