Feature Request: Support publishing to testPyPI without manual edit to .pypirc file

[Mariatta]

Follow up from #122

Members of Vancouver PyLadies are interested to learn how to publish a package to PyPI, but they are not package maintainers. I'm thinking to introduce flit to our members during an upcoming workshop. I'm thinking that they should publish to testPyPI instead of to the production PyPI.

I now know how to publish to testPyPI using flit, but if this can be done without them needing to modify ~/.pypirc manually, then it would make things simpler.

Thanks for the great tool, and I hope you will consider this feature request 🙏 😄

[takluyver]

Thanks I will certainly consider that.

I saw this morning that there's a longer term plan to replace TestPyPI with a staged upload mechanism in PyPI. But I think that's some way off, and I hope that TestPyPI stays around as well.

[takluyver]

This is more tractable now that Flit can prompt for a username & password, because it doesn't depend so much on the config file.

We could allow passing a URL like flit --repository https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ publish, or special-case testpypi as an allowed name.

[merwok]

-r testpypi sounds great!

[marcel-goldschen-ohm]

Any update on this? Frankly, I find the .pypirc file to contribute almost nothing and simply pollute my project directory. The only two things that it seems to let me do as far as flit is concerned is to 1) publish to testpypi (this should be an option within flit itself in my opinion as suggested by @takluyver) and 2) not have to enter my pypi username (this is trivial, and I would prefer to do this rather than have another file polluting my project). If a URL or testpypi flag could be input directly to flit as a command argument (see @takluyver comment above), then it seems there would be no need for a .pypirc file and flit could stop creating one.