How to control the current working directory of the launched process?

[bryanloz-xilinx]

What would you like to know?.
How to control the current working directory of the launched process?

Additional context
When using pytest-xprocess to launch a server process I notice that it is launched in a different directory:
<test_root>/.pytest_cache/d/.xprocess/<test_fixture_name>

I want the freedom to change that, because my poc server is unfortunately relying on local files.

[bryanloz-xilinx]

It seems not so possible...

I did succeed at a nasty hack (conftest.py):

# Reference https://pytest-xprocess.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
import pytest, os, py
from xprocess import XProcess, ProcessStarter

@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def myxprocess(request):
    rootdir = py._path.local.LocalPath(os.environ['MY_WORKING_DIR'])
    with XProcess(request.config, rootdir) as xproc:
        request.config._xprocess = xproc
        yield xproc

@pytest.fixture
def myserver(myxprocess):
    class Starter(ProcessStarter):
        pattern = "Running Dispatch Server on port"
        args = ['myserver', '--profile']

    logfile = myxprocess.ensure("", Starter) # Notice that the empty string is key here (nasty)

    yield

    myxprocess.getinfo("").terminate() # Notice that the empty string is key here (nasty)

[northernSage]

Hey @bryanloz-xilinx , thanks for letting us know about this.

Normally you would just customize process initialization using popen_kwargs as showed in our docs by setting cwd (check official Popen docs for details on this). But this will not work for cwd (specifically) since it's being used internally for setting up xProcessInfo.controldir where logs and PID files will be kept for process management.

I'll go ahead and mark it as a potential feature to be looked into in the future since it seems to be convenient to have. If anyone feels like tackling this, just let me know by commenting here and I'll be happy to review a PR.

[motin]

@bryanloz-xilinx I couldn't make your work for me, but thanks for highlighting the problem here. I found a slightly cleaner workaround: spawn a new bash process with the command, e.g. instead of args = ['myserver', '--profile'], use args = ["bash", "-c", 'cd ../../../../ && myserver --profile']

[thomthom]

@bryanloz-xilinx I couldn't make your work for me, but thanks for highlighting the problem here. I found a slightly cleaner workaround: spawn a new bash process with the command, e.g. instead of args = ['myserver', '--profile'], use args = ["bash", "-c", 'cd ../../../../ && myserver --profile']

Thank you - that workaround worked for me. I however used another python script and used os.chdir and subprocess.run as that gave me a cross platform way of launching the server process using the given working directory.