
Development environment
=======================

Tox can be used to prepare development virtual environment for local projects.
This feature can be useful in order to preserve environment across team members
working on same project. It can be also used by deployment tools to prepare
proper environments.


Configuration
-------------

Firstly, you need to prepare configuration for your development environment. In
order to do that, we must define proper section at ``tox.ini`` file and tell at
what directory environment should be created. Moreover, we need to specify
python version that should be picked, and that the package should be installed
with ``setup.py develop``::

    [testenv:devenv]
    envdir = devenv
    basepython = python2.7
    usedevelop = True
    commands =
    deps =


Actually, you can configure a lot more, those are the only required settings.
In example you can add ``deps`` and ``commands`` settings. Here, we tell tox
not to pick ``commands`` or ``deps`` from base ``testenv`` configuration.


Creating development environment
--------------------------------

Once ``devenv`` section is defined we can instrument tox to create our
environment::

    tox -e devenv

This will create an environment at path specified by ``envdir`` under
``[testenv:devenv]`` section.


Full configuration example
--------------------------

Let's say we want our development environment sit at ``devenv`` and pull
packages from ``requirements.txt`` file which we create at the same directory
as ``tox.ini`` file. We also want to speciy Python version to be 2.7, and use
``setup.py develop`` to work in development mode instead of building and
installing an ``sdist`` package.

Here is example configuration for that::

    [testenv:devenv]
    envdir = devenv
    basepython = python2.7
    usedevelop = True
    deps = -rrequirements.txt

