Option to load initial conftest.py from rootdir rather than current working directory

[henzef]

Would it be possible to add an option to load the initial conftest.py from the rootdir (which can be specified on the commandline) instead of using the automatic discovery that is explained in https://docs.pytest.org/en/6.2.x/writing_plugins.html#plugin-discovery-order-at-tool-startup ?

This seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle that would allow me to execute my test suite independently from the current working directory.
Consider e.g. the following commandline:

pytest -c /home/user/project/pytest.ini --rootdir=/home/user/project --an-argument-of-my-plugin=./some/relative/path

which only works if the current working directory is below /home/user/project. For now I used a wrapper script that changed the cwd before starting pytest, but this fell apart when I introduced commandline arguments that take a (possibly relative) path.

[kdeldycke]

Is this solve in 8.1.0 with #11962 ?

[henzef]

If understand the pyproject.toml discovery correctly, it starts searching from the current working directory, right? If yes, then it will not help in this case.

[kdeldycke]

I don't know if this is a combination of recent Pytest or Poetry upgrade, but moving my tests from my_package/tests/* to the root of my repository at tests/* seems to have fixed the issue for me.

And this over 3 different projects:

• kdeldycke/click-extra@42fe671
• kdeldycke/meta-package-manager@3ca602a
• kdeldycke/mail-deduplicate@f144320

Pretty sure forcing a code layout is not a definitive solution though, but wanted to keep this issue up to date with my current observations.