tests: use temporary copy of test.ini, possibly customized for TEST_DB It was an undocumented feature that if setting the environment variable TEST_DB, that would be used for tests instead of the default kallithea/tests/test.ini sqlalchemy.url . That did however not work for Git hooks and tests would fail. Instead, create a copy of test.ini in the temp folder and use that for testing. If TEST_DB is set, edit the file so the specified DB URL is used. This fixes Git hook related tests if TEST_DB is used. Since this also changes the path of %(here)s to the temporary location, just use the default paths. This also has the advantage that the data folders are now in the temp folder as well. Therefore a broken data folder, from a past run, can no longer influence a test.