Support output to a file to support tox on CI servers

[johnthagen]

Currently tox cannot redirect commands to files, which means when running Pylint from within tox there seems to be no way to output the results to a single (for example HTML) file that a CI server can store for display.

--file-output=y used to be close to what is needed, but it was removed in 2.0, and also created a different file for each module which is difficult to navigate.

Here is the StackOverflow question that relates to this.

flake8 added this feature for the same reason: https://gitlab.com/pycqa/flake8/issues/15

...however my main usage of flake8 is from within tox running under jenkins (using the violations plugin). Since tox doesn't support shell redirection...

[PCManticore]

Why not redirecting pylint command in your tox file into a file?

[johnthagen]

@PCManticore Because (and this was new to me as I hadn't tried before) tox does not support file redirection, so there is no way to do it that I am aware of.

[acerv]

Hello,

I've the same problem when running pylint inside tox. And also this is more complicated once you need to develop a multiplatform application.

The only way to save the pylint stdout inside a file, is to tell tox to use bash or cmd, according with the platform, with '>' operator. Unfortunately, there's not a way to do so but creating multiple tox environments once for each platform, that is (of course) a huge waste of space and time.

Perhaps makes the automation system really complicated and difficult to handle.

[PCManticore]

Thanks for the input @acerv It seems this will be definitely useful, so I'd be happy to reintegrate a --file-output functionality for the entire output.