Request: Global configuration file

Hello and thanks for all your work!

I work at an organization where we run a private PyPI (Artifactory) that that hosts some private tools and acts as a caching proxy for the public PyPI. It’s easy enough to configure pip to use this internal pypi using /etc/pip.conf. However, there’s no global configuration file for setuptools. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that we also use some setup_requires build tools, and some of our build environments are isolated from the internet (they have to use our private PyPI proxy). In order to tell setuptools the URL of our proxy, we have resorted to patching virtualenv to modify the $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/pythonX.Y/distutils/distutils.cfg that it creates, adding our own index_url. However, this is a pain to maintain - we have to rebuild and patch every virtualenv release.

If setuptools would look at, for example, /etc/pydistutils.cfg, then we could put the index_url configuration there. This would let us use the vanilla version of virtualenv while still allowing our builds to use the PyPI proxy.

Does this sound like a direction you’d be willing to go?

Thanks again!

[pganssle]

@tgs I think the issue is a bug in virtualenv or pip that is breaking the build isolation. You can fix it by tightening the bounds on the build requirements to require setuptools >= 40.8.0 or by explicitly adding a build backend (add the line build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta" below the requires line).

I’ll report the bug to virtualenv later tonight.

[dmtucker]

One way to mitigate the immediate effects without having to worry about patching anything would be to build and upload wheels for the “pain point” packages on your private PyPI endpoint (which I’m guessing is some sort of pass-through caching proxy).

Might be worth noting that some options preclude wheel usage:

/…/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_internal/commands/install.py:206: UserWarning: Disabling all use of wheels due to the use of --build-options / --global-options / --install-options.