Hey all 👋 Is there any way to specify custom plugins version in a different file other than pants.toml? Possibly a .txt file? We're implementing custom plugins as python packages and we'd want tools like dependabot to be able to open PR's upticking the plugin version when there are new releases of our plugins, but dependabot is not able to read the pants.toml file and search for new releases for the custom plugins.

You can have the value of any option live in a file, and point to it in config via

@path/to/file

. I'm not sure if this will work for plugins though, as those are needed at bootstrap time and I'm not sure we process that early enough, but worth a try?

Thanks for the response. I've tried that and it works if I have just one dependency in the

.txt

file, when I have multiple, the pants setup fails because the dependencies are read as a single line, even tho each dependency are on different lines. e.g. if I have this

.txt

file:

foo==0.0.1
bar==2.0.1

the pants setup reads the dependencies as

$'foo==0.0.1\nbar==2.0.1'

and fails with:

ProcessExecutionFailure: Process 'Resolving plugins: foo==0.0.1
bar==2.0.1' failed with exit code 1.
stdout:

stderr:
<string> line 1:
foo==0.0.1
bar==2.0.1
Problem parsing 'foo==0.0.1\nbar==2.0.1' as a requirement: Parse error at "'bar==2.'": Expected stringEnd

This is because you're using a text file, so Pants interprets it as a single string to be added on to the list.

that doesn't help dependabot

Indeed, if I try to set the dependencies as a literal python list, dependabot fails with

dependency_file_not_evaluatable

.

this would require augmenting that option to accept a requirements file

Do you think this is something pants could support or this is out of scope?

I think it makes sense to support. One way is in the code that handles the @fromfile feature, to treat all .txt files as line-separated values (at least if the option is list-valued). The current behavior of treating it as a single string with embedded newlines is not intentional and it's unlikely anyone is relying on it. But it's not impossible either, so this is risky. An easier, less intrusive change would be to have the code that consumes the value for this specific option split it by newlines.

iiuc, this expand function is where the content is read from the files specified with the fromfile feature, but changing this to split the

.txt

file content by newlines would affect all options, right? I didn't find on the code where to change just the

plugins

option.

Yeah, I think the right place to do this is where we consume that option, which is in

src/python/pants/init/plugin_resolver.py