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    # (DEPRECATED) defaults to {homedir}/.tox/distshare
envlist=ENVLIST   # defaults to the list of all environments
skipsdist=BOOL    # defaults to false

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:jenkins]
...               # override [tox] settings for the jenkins context
# note: for jenkins distshare defaults to ``{toxworkdir}/distshare`` (DEPRECATED)
skip_missing_interpreters=BOOL

New in version 1.7.2.

Setting this to True is equivalent of passing the --skip-missing-interpreters command line option, and will force tox to return success even if some of the specified environments were missing. This is useful for some CI systems or running on a developer box, where you might only have a subset of all your supported interpreters installed but don’t want to mark the build as failed because of it. As expected, the command line switch always overrides this setting if passed on the invokation. Default: False

envlist=CSV

Determining the environment list that tox is to operate on happens in this order (if any is found, no further lookups are made):

  • 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. Similar to make recipe lines, any command with a leading - will ignore the exit code.

install_command=ARGV

New in version 1.6.

the install_command setting is used for installing packages into the virtual environment; both the package under test and any defined dependencies. Must contain the substitution key {packages} which will be replaced by the packages to install. You should also accept {opts} if you are using pip or easy_install – it will contain index server options if you have configured them via indexserver and the deprecated downloadcache option if you have configured it.

default:

pip install {opts} {packages}
ignore_errors=True|False(default)

New in version 2.0: If True, a non-zero exit code from one command will be ignored and further commands will be executed (which was the default behavior in tox < 2.0). If False (the default), then a non-zero exit code from one command will abort execution of commands for that environment.

It may be helpful to note that this setting is analogous to the -i or ignore-errors option of GNU Make. A similar name was chosen to reflect the similarity in function.

Note that in tox 2.0, the default behavior of tox with respect to treating errors from commands changed. Tox < 2.0 would ignore errors by default. Tox >= 2.0 will abort on an error by default, which is safer and more typical of CI and command execution tools, as it doesn’t make sense to run tests if installing some prerequisite failed and it doesn’t make sense to try to deploy if tests failed.

pip_pre=True|False(default)

New in version 1.9.

If True, adds --pre to the opts passed to install_command. If install_command uses pip, this will cause it to install the latest available pre-release of any dependencies without a specified version. If False (the default), pip will only install final releases of unpinned dependencies.

Passing the --pre command-line option to tox will force this to True for all testenvs.

Don’t set this option if your install_command does not use pip.

whitelist_externals=MULTI-LINE-LIST

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).

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 the installer command for processing. Each line specifies a file, a URL or a package name. You can additionally specify an indexserver to use for installing this dependency but this functionality is deprecated since tox-2.3. All derived dependencies (deps required by the dep) will then be retrieved from the specified indexserver:

deps = :myindexserver:pkg

(Experimentally introduced in 1.6.1) all installer commands are executed using the {toxinidir} as the current working directory.

platform=REGEX

A testenv can define a new platform setting as a regular expression. If a non-empty expression is defined and does not match against the sys.platform string the test environment will be skipped.

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.

passenv=SPACE-SEPARATED-GLOBNAMES

New in version 2.0.

A list of wildcard environment variable names which shall be copied from the tox invocation environment to the test environment when executing test commands. If a specified environment variable doesn’t exist in the tox invocation environment it is ignored. You can use * and ? to match multiple environment variables with one name.

Note that the PATH, LANG and PIP_INDEX_URL variables are unconditionally passed down and on Windows SYSTEMROOT, PATHEXT, TEMP and TMP will be passed down as well whereas on unix TMPDIR will be passed down. You can override these variables with the setenv option.

If defined the TOX_TESTENV_PASSENV environment variable (in the tox invocation environment) can define additional space-separated variable names that are to be passed down to the test command environment.

recreate=True|False(default)

Always recreate virtual environment if this option is True.

downloadcache=path

DEPRECATED – as of August 2013 this option is not very useful because of pypi’s CDN and because of caching pypi server solutions like devpi.

use this directory for caching downloads. This value is overriden by the environment variable PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE if it exists. If you specify a custom install_command that uses an installer other than pip, your installer must support the –download-cache command-line option. default: no download cache will be used.

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 without inheriting the global site packages.

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.

(DEPRECATED, will be removed in a future version) Multi-line name = URL definitions of python package servers. Dependencies 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).

envdir

New in version 1.5.

User can set specific path for environment. If path would not be absolute it would be treated as relative to {toxinidir}. default: {toxworkdir}/{envname}

usedevelop=BOOL

New in version 1.6.

Install the current package in development mode with “setup.py develop” instead of installing from the sdist package. (This uses pip’s -e option, so should be avoided if you’ve specified a custom install_command that does not support -e).

default: False

skip_install=BOOL

New in version 1.9.

Do not install the current package. This can be used when you need the virtualenv management but do not want to install the current package into that environment.

default: False

ignore_outcome=BOOL

New in version 2.2.

If set to True a failing result of this testenv will not make tox fail, only a warning will be produced.

default: False

Substitutions

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

You can escape curly braces with the \ character if you need them, for example:

commands = echo "\{posargs\}" = {posargs}

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}
(DEPRECATED) 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.

environment variable substitutions with default values

If you specify a substitution string like this:

{env:KEY:DEFAULTVALUE}

then the value will be retrieved as os.environ['KEY'] and replace with DEFAULTVALUE if the environment variable does not exist.

If you specify a substitution string like this:

{env:KEY:}

then the value will be retrieved as os.environ['KEY'] and replace with and empty string 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.

Substitution 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 repeating the same values:

[base]
deps =
    pytest
    mock
    pytest-xdist

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

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

Generating environments, conditional settings

New in version 1.8.

Suppose you want to test your package against python2.6, python2.7 and against several versions of a dependency, say Django 1.5 and Django 1.6. You can accomplish that by writing down 2*2 = 4 [testenv:*] sections and then listing all of them in envlist.

However, a better approach looks like this:

[tox]
envlist = {py26,py27}-django{15,16}

[testenv]
basepython =
    py26: python2.6
    py27: python2.7
deps =
    pytest
    django15: Django>=1.5,<1.6
    django16: Django>=1.6,<1.7
    py26: unittest2
commands = py.test

This uses two new facilities of tox-1.8:

  • generative envlist declarations where each envname consists of environment parts or “factors”
  • “factor” specific settings

Let’s go through this step by step.

Generative envlist

envlist = {py26,py27}-django{15,16}

This is bash-style syntax and will create 2*2=4 environment names like this:

py26-django15
py26-django16
py27-django15
py27-django16

You can still list environments explicitly along with generated ones:

envlist = {py26,py27}-django{15,16}, docs, flake

Note

To help with understanding how the variants will produce section values, you can ask tox to show their expansion with a new option:

$ tox -l
py26-django15
py26-django16
py27-django15
py27-django16
docs
flake

Factors and factor-conditional settings

Parts of an environment name delimited by hyphens are called factors and can be used to set values conditionally:

basepython =
    py26: python2.6
    py27: python2.7

This conditional setting will lead to either python2.6 or python2.7 used as base python, e.g. python2.6 is selected if current environment contains py26 factor.

In list settings such as deps or commands you can freely intermix optional lines with unconditional ones:

deps =
    pytest
    django15: Django>=1.5,<1.6
    django16: Django>=1.6,<1.7
    py26: unittest2

Reading it line by line:

  • pytest will be included unconditionally,
  • Django>=1.5,<1.6 will be included for environments containing django15 factor,
  • Django>=1.6,<1.7 similarly depends on django16 factor,
  • unittest will be loaded for Python 2.6 environments.

Note

Tox provides good defaults for basepython setting, so the above ini-file can be further reduced by omitting the basepython setting.

Complex factor conditions

Sometimes you need to specify the same line for several factors or create a special case for a combination of factors. Here is how you do it:

[tox]
envlist = py{26,27,33}-django{15,16}-{sqlite,mysql}

[testenv]
deps =
    py33-mysql: PyMySQL     ; use if both py33 and mysql are in an env name
    py26,py27: urllib3      ; use if any of py26 or py27 are in an env name
    py{26,27}-sqlite: mock  ; mocking sqlite in python 2.x

Take a look at first deps line. It shows how you can special case something for a combination of factors, you just join combining factors with a hyphen. This particular line states that PyMySQL will be loaded for python 3.3, mysql environments, e.g. py33-django15-mysql and py33-django16-mysql.

The second line shows how you use same line for several factors - by listing them delimited by commas. It’s possible to list not only simple factors, but also their combinations like py26-sqlite,py27-sqlite.

Finally, factor expressions are expanded the same way as envlist, so last example could be rewritten as py{26,27}-sqlite.

Note

Factors don’t do substring matching against env name, instead every hyphenated expression is split by - and if ALL the factors in an expression are also factors of an env then that condition is considered hold.

For example, environment py26-mysql:

  • could be matched with expressions py26, py26-mysql, mysql-py26,
  • but not with py2 or py26-sql.

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.