tox {[section]name} substitution does not work in general

[pytoxbot]

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/tox/issue/97
• Originally reported by: @e3krisztian
• Originally created at: 2013-04-25T10:50:07.300

I am trying to reuse tox.ini with minimal changes between projects/packages - the only variation is in deps and the project/package name (see package section below). I want commands to be the same, so I tried to define an ini variable for package name and reference it from commands without success:

#!ini

[package]

name = whatever
deps =
    # package specific dependencies


[tox]

envlist = py27


[testenv]

deps =
    {[package]deps}

    # needed by commands
    nose
    coverage
    pep8
    pyflakes

commands =
    coverage erase
    coverage run {envbindir}/nosetests
    coverage report --show-missing --include={[package]name}/*
    pyflakes {[package]name}
    pep8 {[package]name}

I get tox.ConfigError: ConfigError: substitution key '[package]name' not found with this config.

It looks like the ini reading is restricted to known keys only ({[package]deps} in [testenv]deps works!), so it is currently not possible to introduce & reference new, unknown-to-tox, keys.

A potentially related issue is #38 {[section]name} subsitution does not work for commands

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @hpk42

Issue #38 was marked as a duplicate of this issue.

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @hpk42

Fix issue #97 {[section]name} substitution does not work in general

→ <<cset 5603e77786d8>>

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @e3krisztian

Sure, I have a working version, will request a review soon.

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @hpk42

yes, the config parsing needs to be generalized. Do you feel like giving it a stab?

[TheFriendlyCoder]

I'm not sure if this improvement was completed or not, however in case anyone is interested I found a simple workaround to this limitation - at least for the limited use case described here. Consider the following snippet:

[testenv]
setenv = TOX_PACKAGE_NAME=mypackage
commands = pylint {env:TOX_PACKAGE_NAME}

By defining your desired parameters as environment variables, taking care to name them such that they don't conflict with any other vars in your build environment, you can then use the TOX environment variable substitution to refer to the values.

This might not work for the general case but should be workable for those simple cases like this one.

[obestwalter]

This should be kept open until configuration parsing is generalized (or we decide to leave it that way and then document the limitations).

[gaborbernat]

I think we fixed this now.