Pipenv will pollute my filesystem with Pipfiles

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We have started using pipenv in our project and its great. But it has a tendency to pollute my filesystem with Pipfiles if I do not pay close attention to where I am issuing my commands.

If I am in a directory whose parents do not have Pipfiles, pipenv will simply create a new one no matter what command I issue. This is contrary to what I would expect and definitely contrary to other tools do such as git.

Describe the solution you’d like

For instance git will not start a git repo because I simply issued git status on a non-tracked directory, rather it issues an error:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Now I would expect pipenv to do something similar and only create a Pipfile once I initialise a given repository.

Second and related to the above problem, git has a very useful option git -C <path> which will run as if git was started in path instead of the current working directory. Although pipenv has the PIPENV_PIPFILE, it is not as useful and concise as -C. See a related discussion about git in here.

[uranusjr]

A good way to approach this would be to lay out stages a project should go through from uninitialised (say, a fresh git clone) to fully ready to be executed. Each command can then be inspected from this perspective, to compile a table of what each should be doing if used at a given stage, and what stage the command should take the project into.

[alexgmin]

I didn’t want to appear to dump a pile of complaints, I just wanted to provide some feedback, although I might have gone a bit overboard with the examples.

There are 3 possible behaviors I can think for a command that needs a Pipfile when there’s no Pipfile.

1. Create a Pipfile and do whatever the command does.
2. Raise an error about the missing Pipfile, like pipenv --where does currently.
3. Don’t create a Pipfile but work normally as it there was one. For example, pipenv graph would return nothing. I don’t know if there’s a command that currently works like this.

I’m not sure how this should be focused. Maybe an issue for every command with a behavior that should be revised?