Testing Environment Configuration

Testing via TravisCI

bok-choy can be used along with Travis CI to test changes remotely. One way to accomplish this testing is to use the headless version of Chrome or Firefox. bok-choy does this when the BOKCHOY_HEADLESS environment is set to “true”.

before_script:
  - export BOKCHOY_HEADLESS=true

Another option is to use the X Virtual Framebuffer (xvfb) to imitate a display. Headless versions of Chrome and Firefox are relatively new developments, so you may want to use xvfb if you encounter a bug with headless browser usage. To use xvfb, you’ll start it up via a before_script section in your .travis.yml file, like this:

before_script:
  - "export DISPLAY=:99.0"
  - "sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start"
  - sleep 3 # give xvfb some time to start

For more details, see this code example and the Travis docs.

Testing via tox

bok-choy can be used along with tox to test against multiple Python virtual environments containing different versions of requirements.

An important detail when using tox in a Travis CI environment: tox passes along only a fixed list of environment variables to each tox-created virtual environment. When using bok-choy via xvfb in tox, the DISPLAY environment variable is needed but is not automatically passed-in. The tox.ini file needs to specify the DISPLAY variable like this:

[testenv]
passenv =
    DISPLAY

For more details, see the tox docs.