tox-poetry-installer
A plugin for Tox that lets you install test
environment dependencies from the Poetry lockfile.

⚠️ This project is beta software and is under active development ⚠️
Documentation
See the
Changelog for
release history.
See also: official Tox plugins and
the official Poetry documentation on using Tox
Feature Overview
- Manage package versions in exactly one place and with exactly one tool: Poetry.
- Ensure CI/CD and other automation tools are using the same package versions that you are
in your local development environment.
- Add only the packages or custom groups you need to a Tox test environment, instead of
everything in your lockfile.
- Directly integrate with Poetry, re-using your existing package indexes and credentials,
with no additional configuration.
- Wherever possible, built-in Tox config options are always respected and their behavior
kept consistent.
- Extremely configurable. Every feature can be disabled or enabled for any given Tox test
environment.
- Friendly to other Tox plugins and supports a wide range of environments.
User Documentation
This section is for users looking to integrate the plugin with their project or CI
system. For information on contributing to the plugin please see the
Developer Docs
Installing
The recommended way to install the plugin is to add it to a project using Poetry:
poetry add -G dev tox-poetry-installer[poetry]
ℹ️ Note: Always install the plugin with the [poetry]
extra, unless you are
managing the Poetry installation yourself.
Alternatively, it can be installed directly to a virtual environment using Pip, though
this is not recommended:
source somevenv/bin/activate
pip install tox-poetry-installer
Alternatively alternatively, it can be installed using the Tox
requires
option by
adding the below to tox.ini
, though this is also not recommended:
requires =
tox-poetry-installer[poetry] == 0.10.2
After installing, check that Tox recognizes the plugin by running
poetry run tox --version
. The command should give output similar to below:
3.20.0 imported from .venv/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/tox/__init__.py
registered plugins:
tox-poetry-installer-0.10.2 at .venv/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/tox_poetry_installer/__init__.py
Quick Start
Congratulations! 🎉 Just by installing the plugin your Tox config is already using locked
dependencies: when Tox builds and installs your project package to a test environment,
your project package's dependencies will be installed from the lockfile.
Now lets update an example tox.ini
to install the other test environment dependencies
from the lockfile.
A testenv
from the example tox.ini
we're starting with is below:
[testenv]
description = Some very cool tests
deps =
black == 20.8b1
pylint >=2.4.4,<2.7.0
mypy <0.800
commands = ...
To update the config so that the testenv dependencies are installed from the lockfile, we
can replace the built-in
deps
option with the
locked_deps
option provided by the plugin, and then remove the inline version
specifiers. With these changes the three testenv dependencies (as well as all of their
dependencies) will be installed from the lockfile when the test environment is recreated:
[testenv]
description = Some very cool tests
locked_deps =
black
pylint
mypy
commands = ...
We can also add the require_locked_deps
option to the test environment. This will both
block any other install tools (another plugin or Tox itself) from installing dependencies
to the Tox environment and also cause Tox to fail if the test environment also uses the
built-in deps
option:
[testenv]
description = Some very cool tests
require_locked_deps = true
locked_deps =
black
pylint
mypy
commands = ...
ℹ️ Note: Settings configured on the main testenv
environment are inherited by
child test environments (for example, testenv:foo
). To override this, specify the
setting in the child environment with a different value.
Alternatively, we can skip specifying all of our dependencies for a test environment in
the Tox config and install Poetry dependency groups directly:
[testenv]
description = Some very cool tests
require_locked_deps = true
poetry_dep_groups =
dev
commands = ...
ℹ️ Note: The install_dev_deps
configuration option is deprecated. See
Configuration Options for more information.
Finally, we can also install an unlocked dependency (a dependency which doesn't take its
version from the Poetry lockfile) into the test environment alongside the locked ones. We
need to remove the require_locked_deps = true
option, otherwise the environment will
error, and then we can add the unlocked dependency using the built-in
deps
option:
[testenv]
description = Some very cool tests
deps =
pytest >= 5.6.0,<6.0.0
locked_deps =
black
pylint
mypy
commands = ...
References
Configuration Options
All options listed below are Tox environment options and can be applied to one or more
environment sections of the tox.ini
file. They cannot be applied to the global Tox
configuration section.
ℹ️ Note: Settings configured on the main testenv
environment are inherited by
child test environments (for example, testenv:foo
). To override this, specify the
setting in the child environment with a different value.
Option | Type | Default | Description |
---|
locked_deps | List | [] | Names of packages to install to the test environment from the Poetry lockfile. Transient dependencies (packages required by these dependencies) are automatically included. |
require_locked_deps | Boolean | False | Whether the plugin should block attempts to install unlocked dependencies to the test environment. If enabled, then the tox_testenv_install_deps plugin hook will be intercepted and an error will be raised if the test environment has the deps option configured. |
install_project_deps | Boolean | True | Whether all of the Poetry primary dependencies for the project package should be installed to the test environment. |
require_poetry | Boolean | False | Whether Tox should be forced to fail if the plugin cannot import Poetry locally. If False then the plugin will be skipped for the test environment if Poetry cannot be imported. If True then the plugin will force the environment to error and the Tox run to fail. |
poetry_dep_groups | List | [] | Names of Poetry dependency groups specified in pyproject.toml to install to the test environment. |
ℹ️ Note: The install_dev_deps
configuration option is deprecated and will be
removed in version 1.0.0. Please set poetry_dep_groups = [dev]
in tox.ini
for
environments that install the development dependencies.
Runtime Options
All arguments listed below can be passed to the tox
command to modify runtime behavior
of the plugin.
Argument | Type | Default | Description |
---|
--parallel-install-threads | Integer | 10 | Number of worker threads to use to install dependencies in parallel. Installing in parallel with more threads can greatly speed up the install process, but can cause race conditions during install. Pass this option with the value 0 to entirely disable parallel installation. |
ℹ️ Note: The --require-poetry
runtime option is deprecated and will be removed in
version 1.0.0. Please set require_poetry = true
in tox.ini
for environments that
should fail if Poetry is not available.
ℹ️ Note: The --parallelize-locked-install
option is deprecated and will be removed
in version 1.0.0. Please use the --parallel-install-threads
option.
Errors
There are several errors that the plugin can encounter for a test environment when Tox is
run. If an error is encountered then the status of the test environment that caused the
error will be set to one of the "Status" values below to indicate what the error was.
Status/Name | Cause |
---|
ExtraNotFoundError | Indicates that the extras config option specified an extra that is not configured by Poetry in pyproject.toml . |
LockedDepVersionConflictError | Indicates that an item in the locked_deps config option includes a PEP-508 version specifier (ex: pytest >=6.0, <6.1 ). |
LockedDepNotFoundError | Indicates that an item specified in the locked_deps config option does not match the name of a package in the Poetry lockfile. |
LockedDepsRequiredError | Indicates that a test environment with the require_locked_deps config option set to true also specified unlocked dependencies using the deps config option. |
PoetryNotInstalledError | Indicates that the poetry module could not be imported under the current runtime environment, and require_poetry = true was specified. |
RequiresUnsafeDepError | Indicates that the package-under-test depends on a package that Poetry has classified as unsafe and cannot be installed. |
ℹ️ Note: One or more of these errors can be caused by the pyproject.toml
being out
of sync with the Poetry lockfile. If this is the case, than a warning will be logged
when Tox is run.
Other Notes
Unsupported Tox config options
Below are the built-in Tox config options that are not respected by this plugin. All of
these options are made obsolete by the Poetry lockfile: either they aren't needed or their
equivalent functionality is instead taken directly from the package details Poetry stores
in its lockfile.
ℹ️ Note: The unsupported Tox config options will still apply to unlocked
dependencies being installed with the default Tox installation backend.
Updating locked dependencies in a testenv
When Poetry updates the version of a package in the lockfile (using either poetry lock
or poetry update
) then the plugin will automatically use this new version to install the
package to a test environment; there is no need to manually update tox.ini
after
updating the Poetry lockfile.
However, the plugin cannot determine when the lockfile is updated. If a Tox test
environment has already been created then it will need to be recreated (using Tox's
built-in
--recreate
option) for the new version to be found and installed.
ℹ️ Note: To force Tox to always recreate a test environment the
recreate
config
option can be set.
Using with an unmanaged Poetry installation
In CI/CD systems, automation environments, or other Python environments where the loaded
site packages are not managed by Poetry, it can be useful to manage the local installation
of Poetry externally. This also helps to avoid problems that can be caused by the
--no-root
, --without dev
, or --sync
arguments to the poetry install
command which,
in some situations, can cause Poetry to uninstall itself if Poetry is specified as a
dependency of one of the packages it is managing (like this plugin). To support these use
cases, this plugin specifies the poetry
package as an optional dependency that can be
installed using a setuptools extra also named poetry
.
⚠️ Warning: This plugin requires Poetry to function. If the plugin is installed
without the poetry
setuptools extra then Poetry must be installed independently for
the plugin to function properly.
To skip installing the poetry
package as a dependency of tox-poetry-installer
, do not
specify the poetry
extra when adding the plugin:
poetry add -G dev tox-poetry-installer
poetry add -G dev tox-poetry-installer[poetry]
Once the plugin is installed- either with or without the Poetry extra- you can validate
that the plugin will run correctly with the following command. This command checks that
all three required components (Tox, Poetry, and the plugin itself) are available in the
current Python environment:
python -c '\
import tox;\
import tox_poetry_installer;\
from poetry.poetry import Poetry;\
'
ℹ️ Note: To force Tox to fail if Poetry is not installed, add the
require_poetry = true
option to the tox [testenv]
configuration. See the
Config Options for more information.
Developer Documentation
All project contributors and participants are expected to adhere to the
Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct, v2
(external link).
The devel
branch has the latest (and potentially unstable) changes. The stable releases
are tracked on Github,
PyPi, and in the
Changelog.
Developing this project requires Python 3.10+ and
Poetry 1.4 or later. GNU Make can
optionally be used to quickly setup a local development environment, but this is not
required.
To setup a local development environment:
git clone https://github.com/enpaul/tox-poetry-installer.git
git clone git@github.com:enpaul/tox-poetry-installer.git
cd tox-poetry-installer/
make dev
make test
make help
ℹ️ Note: The pre-commit hooks require dependencies in the Poetry environment to run.
To make a commit with the pre-commit hooks, you will need to run poetry run git commit
or, alternatively,
launch an environment shell.
Road Map
This project is under active development and is classified as beta software, ready for
production environments on a provisional basis only.
- Beta classification was assigned with
v0.6.0
- Stable classification will be assigned when the test suite covers an acceptable number
of use cases
Path to Beta
Path to Stable
Everything in Beta plus...