[TIP] Tox : Can I retrieve a project version from within tox.ini

[holger krekel]

Hi Laurent,

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 12:44 -0700, Laurent Brack wrote:
> >On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 11:58 -0700, Laurent Brack wrote:
> >>I was wondering if it was possible to retrieve a project version
> >>from within tox other than by exporting it to an environment
> >>variable prior to running tox.
> >>
> >>something equivalent to export VERSION=`myproject --version`
> >>
> >>I know that you can do something like {env:MY_VERSION:1.2} but this
> >>requires that the version env. var is set prior to calling tox.
> >>
> >>being able to extract this information during a tox run would be useful.
> >
> >In principle these lines work if you need a version from python code:
> >
> >     import pkg_resources
> >     print (pkg_resources.get_distribution("myproject").version)
> >
> Thanks for the answer but I realize that perhaps I was really clear.
> I meant within the tox.ini file itself. I wanted to avoid having to
> wrap the tox call (see below).
> 
> Basically, I was looking for something in the tox specification
> which would allow me to do this (not from python). This
> ({env:MY_VERSION:1.2}) was an excerpt from my tox.ini which requires
> me to export the version prior to calling tox or default to a
> (hopefully) not too bogus value.
>
> Sorry for the confusion

Setting environment variables more dynamically requires some more shell
like functionality (backticks for example) which tox does not have (yet?).  
Or we would need to introduce a specific option for calling
a script and having it return a list of environment settings.

If we had shell style backticks we could do:

    setenv =
        MYVERSION = `python -c ...`

and everything would be fine.

> >If you for some reason can't do that you need to wrap what you call with
> >a script that uses the above to set an environment variable before
> >calling the script.
> >
> I wanted to avoid this. One of the reason is that this wrapper won't
> be called by devpi test. In our tox files, we upload the xunit
> report generated by pytest to a different test management system.

I meant a wrapper around the command(s) that are in the "commands" section.

So instead of:

    commands = py.test ...

you'd have

    commands = python setenv.py PKG_I_WANT_VERSION_OF \
               py.test ...

You'd have to ship the setenv.py script and after setting
the environment variable do a subprocess call with the remainder
of the arguments.  Or am i still misunderstanding something?

> There are more convoluted ways to do what I want to do but I was
> hoping for a cleaner solution ... convolution always comes bite you
> in the rear end eventually :).

Software seldomly does exactly what we want it too or otherwise
we'd all be out of work to do :)

cheers,
holger