tox-server is a command line tool which runs tox in a loop
and calls it with commands from a remote CLI. It responds to commands
via ZeroMQ. It isn't super useful on its own (as it doesn't eliminate the startup time for tox, just runs it repeatedly) but it is
helpful if your tests have to be run inside another environment with some setup cost, such as a docker container.
You can use pip to install tox-server:
$ pip install tox-server
On the remote host:
$ tox-server serve
The server binds to 127.0.0.1 (i.e. it will only accept connections from localhost) because it is
not secured. If you are running it on an isolated network (like via docker), you can bind it to another host
with tox-server -b 0.0.0.0 serve.
On your local host, you can run a tox command:
$ tox-server run -e py37
This will run tox -e py37 on the remote host.
Basically, security is hard. This program doesn't provide any authentication mechanism, and I'm not tempted
to add one. Before you expose ports from tox-server to the world wide web, I'd advise using something like
SSH tunneling to provide security and authentication.