The Nox Cookbook

The What?

A lot of people and a lot of projects use Nox for their python automation powers.

Some of these sessions are the classic “run pytest and linting”, some are more unique and more interesting!

The Nox cookbook is a collection of these such sessions.

Nox is super easy to get started with, and super powerful right out of the box. But when things get complex or you want to chain together some more powerful tasks, often the only examples can be found hunting around GitHub for novel sessions.

The kind of sessions that make you think “I didn’t know you could do that!”

This cookbook is intended to be a centralized, community-driven repository of awesome Nox sessions to act as a source of inspiration and a reference guide for Nox’s users. If you’re doing something cool with Nox, why not add your session here?

Contributing a Session

Anyone can contribute sessions to the cookbook. However, there are a few guiding principles you should keep in mind:

• Your session should be interesting or unique, it should do something out of the ordinary or otherwise interesting.

• You should explain briefly what it does and why it’s interesting.

For general advice on how to contribute to Nox see our Contributing guide

Recipes

Instant Dev Environment

A common sticking point in contributing to python projects (especially for beginners) is the problem of wrangling virtual environments and installing dependencies.

Enter the dev nox session:

import os

import nox

# It's a good idea to keep your dev session out of the default list
# so it's not run twice accidentally
nox.options.sessions = [...] # Sessions other than 'dev'

# this VENV_DIR constant specifies the name of the dir that the `dev`
# session will create, containing the virtualenv;
# the `resolve()` makes it portable
VENV_DIR = pathlib.Path('./.venv').resolve()

@nox.session
def dev(session: nox.Session) -> None:
    """
    Sets up a python development environment for the project.

    This session will:
    - Create a python virtualenv for the session
    - Install the `virtualenv` cli tool into this environment
    - Use `virtualenv` to create a global project virtual environment
    - Invoke the python interpreter from the global project environment to install
      the project and all it's development dependencies.
    """

    session.install("virtualenv")
    # the VENV_DIR constant is explained above
    session.run("virtualenv", os.fsdecode(VENV_DIR), silent=True)

    python = os.fsdecode(VENV_DIR.joinpath("bin/python"))

    # Use the venv's interpreter to install the project along with
    # all it's dev dependencies, this ensures it's installed in the right way
    session.run(python, "-m", "pip", "install", "-e", ".[dev]", external=True)

With this, a user can simply run nox -s dev and have their entire environment set up automatically!

The Auto-Release

Releasing a new version of an open source project can be a real pain, with lots of intricate steps. Tools like Bump2Version really help here.

Even more so with a sprinkling of Nox:

import nox

@nox.session
def release(session: nox.Session) -> None:
    """
    Kicks off an automated release process by creating and pushing a new tag.

    Invokes bump2version with the posarg setting the version.

    Usage:
    $ nox -s release -- [major|minor|patch]
    """
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Release a semver version.")
    parser.add_argument(
        "version",
        type=str,
        nargs=1,
        help="The type of semver release to make.",
        choices={"major", "minor", "patch"},
    )
    args: argparse.Namespace = parser.parse_args(args=session.posargs)
    version: str = args.version.pop()

    # If we get here, we should be good to go
    # Let's do a final check for safety
    confirm = input(
        f"You are about to bump the {version!r} version. Are you sure? [y/n]: "
    )

    # Abort on anything other than 'y'
    if confirm.lower().strip() != "y":
        session.error(f"You said no when prompted to bump the {version!r} version.")


    session.install("bump2version")

    session.log(f"Bumping the {version!r} version")
    session.run("bump2version", version)

    session.log("Pushing the new tag")
    session.run("git", "push", external=True)
    session.run("git", "push", "--tags", external=True)

Now a simple nox -s release -- patch will automate your release (provided you have Bump2Version set up to change your files). This is especially powerful if you have a CI/CD pipeline set up!