Setup remote environment when using xdist

Question

I'm currently working on a project involving tests to be run at a remote host (bash). Unfortunately, the remote python interpreter does not respect the available site-packages (it's an embedded one: abaqus python (2.6)). Using the PYTHONPATH variable, however, works to specify local installations and makes additional packages available. Hence, on the remote machine I simply add a respective line to my .bashrc file.

Unfortunately, when distributing tests using xdist only a "bare" bash is invoked, without any profile specific rcs loaded. Thus, the tests fail with some import errors as argparse, which is required by pytest is not available.

Is there a way the setup a remote host before it starts executing any pytest code (which requires argparse)? In other words is there a way to add environment variables on the hosts before the pytest imports start?

I tried using fixtures with session scope and autouse=True which (of course) didn't work. Moreover I tried something like

# in conftest.py
import sys    
def pytest_configure_node():
    sys.path.insert(1, "/somepath/")
    print sys.path

This looks like it is executed on the remote host but sys.path remains the hosts one and the argparse module still cannot be imported.

I start the tests using

py.test --tx ssh=user@server//python="abaqus613 python" -vs --dist=each --rsyncdir foo

This starts the right python interpreter (Python 2.6.2 for Abaqus 6.13-2), but fails with

ImportError: No module named argparse

Answer 1

I finally figured out a quite hackish but reasonably working way. It is possible to specify a series of commands in the python call, hence I source a script which setups the environment before calling abaqus python.

The setup script (setup.sh), located on the remote machine, looks like:

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/libraries

and the complete call is now

py.test --tx ssh=user@server//python="source setup.sh;abaqus613 python" -vs --dist=each --rsyncdir foo

This way I get the necessary imports working in abaqus python.