Who's using code generation through Pants right now? And how to do you get it to play nice with IDEs that expect those files to exist on disk, rather than just on-demand in a Pants execution sandbox?

I cheated. I wrote a fmt plugin that actually generates code because fmt can write to files in the workspace unlike codegen which is only for files that are "ephemeral" and should not be committed to version control. You can only get the codegen files in a packaged artifact or by exporting it.

In VSCode, you can use

python.analysis.extraPaths

. That will give you code completion and go to the definition. Example:

"python.analysis.extraPaths": [
        "./dist/codegen/src"
    ]

there is also the

export-codegen

goal as it turns out, been around since 2.16 at least.

The big gotcha with

export-codegen

is that it will only export under a subfolder like

dist/

, so it does not help for files you want to generate and store WITH the rest of your sources.

Yes, but I'd argue you rarely want to store/commit generated code in your source tree. If you do, then sure, fair cop, your workaround is a good one. 👍

go-generate

is another goal that provides a way for codegen to end up with the sources, as versioning generated files is standard practice with go development. Unlike standard pants codegen, you actually have to run

go-generate

to get the codegen to run.

Sounds reasonable to me. It does feel like it would be better as something you need to opt-into. Potentially if the

persist-codegen

command would have made a change, but can't because the target hasn't opted in, spit out a warning/info/whatever is appropriate indicating that the

persist=True

option is required? Otherwise you might get a bunch of people saying "hey, I used

persist-codegen

, why isn't it showing up in my workspace?"

Not ideal but that does the job:

pants export-codegen :: && cd dist/codegen && cp --parents **/*.{py,pyi} <path_to_your_repo>

I am using that in VSCode Tasks with

<path_to_your_repo>

set to

${workspaceFolder}

.

I could see this being a feature though, especially if there's some guardrails around what files it can touch, and those file patterns are integrated into the fs watcher ignores like gitignore and pants_ignore patterns