Can't share a .tox directory between OS X and Windows

[pytoxbot]

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/tox/issue/44
• Originally reported by: @mchaput
• Originally created at: 2012-07-17T04:11:12.177

This may seem like a corner case, but it's a bit frustrating and seems like it might not be too hard to fix.

I work in a mercurial repo in my Dropbox so I can go from home (on a Mac) to work (on Windows 7) and have my source files automatically sync.

Unfortunately, every time I run tox on one platform, it completely blows away all the files from the other platform and rebuilds everything. This is slow and makes it impossible to do certain convenient things, like set up tools to use the tox virtualenvs (since they keep being deleted!).

It would be nice if tox set up its files/directories so virtualenvs from different platforms could co-exist in the same .tox directory.

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @ulope

Take a look at https://github.com/ulope/tox-externalworkdir. The plugin moves the .tox workdir to a location outside the project (by default ~/.cache/tox/<projectname>, overridable by an env variable TOXWORKDIRBASE).
Maybe that can solve your problem.

Unfortunately the implementation is a bit ugly for now since there is currently no really fitting hook in tox which could be used. That's also why I haven't released it to PyPI yet, but you can install it straight from GitHub (i.e. pip install git+http://github.com/ulope/tox-externalworkdir.git). I've been using it on my machines for about a year now on a multitude of projects without any issues.

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @yarikoptic

.tox/ directory seems to be hardcoded... I wish it was possible to override any of the tox variables (e.g. toxinitdir, or toxworkdir) from the command line, then I could run on one system specifying one directory or another. In my case it is not different physical OSs but different Linux docker instances with which get the same repository mounted, while I want to use tox to test in those different environments (with using sitepackages)

[obestwalter]

This is entirely solvable already with tox functionality:

The tox working directory can be set via {toxworkdir} - this can be combined with using an environment variable to set it on invocation e.g.:

[tox]
toxworkdir = {env:TOX_CUSTOM_WORKDIR:.tox}

Now you can call tox with different values from different osses and they all have their own workdir