Hi all! Is there a way to expand macros?

I'm not aware of any such method. I think despite the name, it's important to remember that macros are fundamentally Python code that is executed.

Yes, I understand, but macros must not have side effects, so in theory it should be possible to expand the list of targets generated by the macro

Ah! That might be... more? possible. I was thinking of verbatim expansion. You could probably do something funky with tags and filtering but I don't think there's a built-in method for it.

Yes, we have several macros and I want to replace them with the expanded targets and then rearrange build files

I have some macros in the repo and I made a deliberate choice to set tags on them exactly for this reason - when running

pants peek

, I can identify them with

jq

. If you only have a handful of them, it may arguably be the easiest way to connect the original macro and the expanded build target.

def macro(**kwargs):  
    kwargs.update({"tags": ["my-macro-type-tag"]})
    python_sources(**kwargs)

I’d say

pants peek

is the answer to this. It let’s you see all targets and their field values, including those created by macros.