Undocumented user level config file [tox4]

[ziima]

In FAQ for tox 4 I discovered a note about "user level config-file", but I can't find any details, such as default file location, structure of the config and its behavior.

[jugmac00]

Thanks for your report. I agree this is under-documented.

As a starter, if you finish the above quoted sentence, it is mentioned that you should run tox --help for the file location.

When I do that, I see

config file '/home/jugmac00/.config/tox/config.ini' missing (change via env var TOX_CONFIG_FILE)

at the very end of the output.

[jugmac00]

@gaborbernat I played a bit with user level config-file.

Could you give an example how one would look like and what use cases are there?

Then I could create some documentation.

[gaborbernat]

It's mostly to alter CLI defaults, e.g. you can set:

[tox]
work_dir = .tox-magic

To change the working directory, I think 🤔

[kpfleming]

I just tried to use this for the first time. I have /tox/config.ini with only the example above (setting the workdir (not work_dir)), and TOX_CONFIG_FILE pointed to it.

Unfortunately tox doesn't even look at tox.ini in the local directory with the environment variable set this way. In a directory containing a tox.ini which defines 7 environments:

• With TOX_CONFIG_FILE set to point to the user-level config file, tox list lists only the default py environment.

• With TOX_CONFIG_FILE not set, tox list lists the seven defined environments.

At least with tox 4.3.5, this is not working the way it is documented, the specified configuration file replaces the automatically-found one, it doesn't augment it. If you'd prefer that I open a new issue, I'm happy to do that.

[masenf]

Link issue #2890