Would it be a good fit, if pants would provides the same functionality like pip-tools? Primarily I'm thinking about the part where you specify your dependencies (either version pinned or not) in

*.in

files and

pip-compile

renders the

*.txt

requirements files. Maybe this functionality is also already implemented in pants, or it might be a good feature request ... I'm just thinking out loud to further understand pantsbuild. So, any comments appreciated 🙂

I have never used

pip-compile

but googling I think you are looking for the info about exact version and the transitive dependencies or something else?

Lockfile is the keyword you're missing in your doc search: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/python-lockfiles

yeah, it's related to the lockfiles, also transitive dependencies - for me the advantage of the

*.in

files is that my intended dependencies are clearly stated. f.e. if I install just django, I end up with:

asgiref==3.7.2
Django==4.2.4
sqlparse==0.4.4

in the dependencies so if I'd just do now

pip freeze > requirements.txt

I can't tell anymore if I did only

pip install django

or the also the others. with this simple example of course it's not a big deal, but with a growing code base it's really hard to determine what was the intended dependency and what wasn't.

Pants offers this: the

python_requirement

targets (and related ones) can be used to specify the “real” dependencies, and the generated lock file includes all the transitive ones.

For example, look at any of the requirements txt files here (equivalent to in files) and the corresponding lock file: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/tree/main/3rdparty%2Fpython

Ok makes sense, thx to you both

can also use poetry-based

pyproject.yaml

to get a very similar thing with poetry_requirements.

yeah true, forgot about this already (ditched poetry again a while ago)