tox-direct

PLEASE NOTE: only use this plugin if you know what you are doing and you have a good reason to do so. In the general case it is not necessary and considered bad practice.

tox plugin to be able to run commands directly without creating a virtual environments first.

This might seem pointless but if tox is used as a single entry point into all developer workflows this can be useful in certain scenarios - e.g.:

• something needs to be done which does not require a virtual environment (because only system commands are run)

• something has to run in the same interpreter that is running tox (e.g. testing things inside a docker container where everything is already set up correctly in a dedicated virtual environment)

At the moment there are two ways to run tox envs in direct mode:

1. if the testenv name contains the word "direct"
2. if the environment variable TOX_DIRECT is set

installation

pip install tox-direct

minimal example

[tox]
skipdist = True
; you could add this to express that it's needed but if it is not installed
; tox will create a venv and install it there and run everything from that
; venv which somehow defeats the purpose a bit then :)
;requires = tox-direct

[testenv:direct-action]
skip_install = True
commands = which python

[testenv:something-else]
skip_install = True
commands = which python

If I run these in a virtual environment (.virtualenvs/tmp) with tox and tox-direct installed:

$ tox -qre direct-action  

We need direct action! No virtual environment! Ain't Nobody Got Time for That!
/home/ob/.virtualenvs/tmp/bin/python
_______________________________ summary _______________________________________
  direct-action: commands succeeded
  congratulations :)

$ TOX_DIRECT=1 tox -qre something-else

We need direct action! No virtual environment! Ain't Nobody Got Time for That!
/home/ob/.virtualenvs/tmp/bin/python
_______________________________ summary _______________________________________
  something-else: commands succeeded
  congratulations :)

So everything would be executed (and also installed) directly in that environment.