Today I was adding tox and Travis-CI support to a Django project, and I ran into a problem: our project doesn’t have a setup.py. Of course I could have added one, but since by convention we don’t package our Django projects (Django applications are a different story) – instead we use virtualenv and pip requirements files – I wanted to see if I could make tox work without changing our project.

Turns out it is quite easy: just add the following three directives to your tox.ini.

In your [tox] section tell tox not to run setup.py:

skipsdist = True

In your [testenv] section make tox install your requirements (see here for more details):

deps = -r{toxinidir}/dev-requirements.txt

Finally, also in your [testenv] section, tell tox how to run your tests:

commands = python manage.py test

Now you can run tox, and your tests should run!

For reference, here is a the complete (albeit minimal) tox.ini file I used:

[tox]
envlist = py27
skipsdist = True

[testenv]
deps = -r{toxinidir}/dev-requirements.txt
setenv =
    PYTHONPATH = {toxinidir}:{toxinidir}
commands = python manage.py test