tox-faster

A tox plugin that speeds up tox a little.

Speedups

tox-faster implements these tox speedups:

Disables tox's dependency listing (the "env report")

Every single time you run tox it runs pip freeze to print out a list of all the packages installed in the testenv being run:

tox -e lint
lint installed: aiohttp==3.8.1,aioresponses==0.7.3,aiosignal==1.2.0,
alembic==1.8.0,amqp==5.1.1,astroid==2.11.6,async-timeout==4.0.1,attrs==20.2.0,
...
lint run-test-pre: PYTHONHASHSEED='2115099637'
lint run-test: commands[0] | pylint lms bin
...

You don't need to see that in your terminal every time you run tox and if your venv contains a lot of packages it's quite annoying because it prints screenfulls of text. Running pip freeze also introduces a noticeable delay in the startup time of every tox command: on my machine with my venv it adds about 250ms.

You can hide this output by running tox with -q but that doesn't make tox run any faster: it seems that it still runs the pip freeze even though it doesn't print it.

tox-faster actually prevents tox from running pip freeze so your tox output will be shorter and your tox commands will start faster:

$ tox -e lint
lint run-test-pre: PYTHONHASHSEED='3084948731'
lint run-test: commands[0] | pylint lms bin
...

tox-faster doesn't disable the env report on CI. The env report can be useful diagnostic information on CI so if an environment variable named CI is set to any value then tox-faster won't disable the env report. This also enables you to re-enable the env report locally by running CI=true tox ....

Setting up Your tox-faster Development Environment

First you'll need to install:

• Git. On Ubuntu: sudo apt install git, on macOS: brew install git.
• GNU Make. This is probably already installed, run make --version to check.
• pyenv. Follow the instructions in pyenv's README to install it. The Homebrew method works best on macOS. The Basic GitHub Checkout method works best on Ubuntu. You don't need to set up pyenv's shell integration ("shims"), you can use pyenv without shims.

Then to set up your development environment:

git clone https://github.com/hypothesis/tox-faster.git
cd tox-faster
make help

Releasing a New Version of the Project

1. First, to get PyPI publishing working you need to go to: https://github.com/organizations/hypothesis/settings/secrets/actions/PYPI_TOKEN and add tox-faster to the PYPI_TOKEN secret's selected repositories.

2. Now that the tox-faster project has access to the PYPI_TOKEN secret you can release a new version by just creating a new GitHub release. Publishing a new GitHub release will automatically trigger a GitHub Actions workflow that will build the new version of your Python package and upload it to https://pypi.org/project/tox-faster.

Changing the Project's Python Versions

To change what versions of Python the project uses:

1. Change the Python versions in the cookiecutter.json file. For example:

   "python_versions": "3.10.4, 3.9.12",

2. Re-run the cookiecutter template:

   make template
   

3. Commit everything to git and send a pull request

Changing the Project's Python Dependencies

To change the production dependencies in the setup.cfg file:

1. Change the dependencies in the .cookiecutter/includes/setuptools/install_requires file. If this file doesn't exist yet create it and add some dependencies to it. For example:

   pyramid
   sqlalchemy
   celery
   

2. Re-run the cookiecutter template:

   make template
   

3. Commit everything to git and send a pull request

To change the project's formatting, linting and test dependencies:

1. Change the dependencies in the .cookiecutter/includes/tox/deps file. If this file doesn't exist yet create it and add some dependencies to it. Use tox's factor-conditional settings to limit which environment(s) each dependency is used in. For example:

   lint: flake8,
   format: autopep8,
   lint,tests: pytest-faker,
   

2. Re-run the cookiecutter template:

   make template
   

3. Commit everything to git and send a pull request

Testing Manually

To test it manually you can install your local development copy of tox-faster into the local development environment of another tox-using project such as cookiecutter-pypackage-test:

1. Install a local development copy of cookiecutter-pypackage-test in a temporary directory:

   git clone https://github.com/hypothesis/cookiecutter-pypackage-test.git /tmp/cookiecutter-pypackage-test
   

2. Run cookiecutter-pypackage-test's make sure command to make sure that everything is working and to trigger tox to create its .tox/.tox venv:

   make --directory "/tmp/cookiecutter-pypackage-test" sure
   

3. Uninstall the production copy of tox-faster from cookiecutter-pypackage-test's .tox/.tox venv:

   /tmp/cookiecutter-pypackage-test/.tox/.tox/bin/pip uninstall tox-faster
   

4. Install your local development copy of tox-faster into cookiecutter-pypackage-test's .tox/.tox venv:

   /tmp/cookiecutter-pypackage-test/.tox/.tox/bin/pip install -e .
   

5. Now cookiecutter-pypackage-test commands will use your local development copy of tox-faster:

   make --directory "/tmp/cookiecutter-pypackage-test" test