Welcome to the tox automation project

vision: merge packaging, testing and release

tox aims to automate state-of-the-art packaging, testing and releasing of Python software right from your console or CI server, invoking your tools of choice.

What is Tox?

Tox as is a generic virtualenv management and test command line tool you can use for:

• checking your package installs correctly with different Python versions and interpreters
• running your tests in each of the environments, configuring your test tool of choice
• acting as a frontend to Continuous Integration servers, greatly reducing boilerplate and merging CI and shell-based testing.

Basic example

First, install tox with pip install tox or easy_install tox. Then put basic information about your project and the test environments you want your project to run in into a tox.ini file residing right next to your setup.py file:

# content of: tox.ini , put in same dir as setup.py
[tox]
envlist = py26,py27
[testenv]
deps=pytest       # install pytest in the venvs
commands=py.test  # or 'nosetests' or ...

To sdist-package, install and test your project against Python2.6 and Python2.7, just type:

tox

and watch things happening (you must have python2.6 and python2.7 installed in your environment otherwise you will see errors). When you run tox a second time you’ll note that it runs much faster because it keeps track of virtualenv details and will not recreate or re-install dependencies. You also might want to checkout tox configuration and usage examples to get some more ideas.

Current features

• automation of tedious Python related test activities

• test your Python package against many interpreter and dependency configs

  • automatic customizable (re)creation of virtualenv test environments
  • installs your setup.py based project into each virtual environment
  • test-tool agnostic: runs py.test, nose or unittests in a uniform manner

• supports using different / multiple PyPI index servers

• uses pip (for Python2 environments) and distribute (for all environments) by default

• cross-Python compatible: Python-2.5 up to Python-3.2, Jython and Python3 support as well as for pypy

• cross-platform: Windows and Unix style environments

• integrates with continuous integration servers like Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) and helps you to avoid boilerplatish and platform-specific build-step hacks.

• unified automatic artifact management between tox runs both in a local developer shell as well as in a CI/Jenkins context.

• driven by a simple ini-style config file

• documented examples and configuration

• concise reporting about tool invocations and configuration errors

• professionally supported