Support for phony environments

[brechtm]

Tox can also be used as a make tool. For example, I created targets/environments to build the documentation for my project (Sphinx), an stand-alone installer for Windows and a stand-alone Mac application.

The envlist value in [tox] in tox.ini allows specifying which environments should be executed when not specifying one manually. I only include the test environments in envlist. It would be nice if it were possible to define fake environments that simply execute a number of other (real) environments. This would also be useful for pure test environments.

[brechtm]

Phony environments could be specified as follows:

[phony:docs]
envlist = test-docs, build-docs

On another note, for environments that do not really test anything (build docs, build installer), it is strange that the environment needs to be specified as [testenv:build-something]. Could another category of environments be introduced? For example [target:build-something] or [buildenv:build-something]. These environments could behave differently from test environments, but I'm not sure what would make sense. The default values could for skip_install and usedevelop could be set to true and false, respectively.

[obestwalter]

Using tox as a pythonic make replacement seems to become more and more common and it surely is a good idea to think about how needs growing from that can better be accommodated.

Regarding your .Phony suggestion: this sounds like you are basically looking for #238 where the idea is also to group environments.

About your other point (having sections being named more fittingly for the tasks): I see your point, but I don't have an opinion about this yet.

[funkyfuture]

it would be useful to use this as a circuit breaker too, so the phony stops on the first failure of one of the environments.

though it should be configurable whether a fail aborts or not, as one of my current would-e-a-use-case shows:

[phony:all]
envlist = flake8, mypy, unittests, integration
abortonfail = True

[phony:integration]
envlist = integrationrun, teardown-redis-container
abortonfail = False  ; ensure the container is stopped

[phony:integrationrun]
envlist = setup-redis-container, integrationtests
abortonfail = True

hm, this is rather complicated. i'd prefer something like boolean operators and expressions grouped by parenthesis.

[pawamoy]

I like to define "shortcuts" as well in my tox conf, like:

[testenv:check]
skip_install = true
commands = tox -e checksetup,checksafety,checkstyle,checkspell,checklink

[testenv:checksetup]
...

Also, I can't do:

[tox]
envlist = check,docs,test

[testenv:test]
commands = tox -e py27-django19,py34-django19

... because py27-django19 and py34-django19 are not defined in tox's envlist.

[gaborbernat]

Duplicate of #647.