After some further investigation I discovered the reason I was having issues with

django-tailwind

running

tailwind start

is that the node modules need to be part of the sandbox. To do this I'm doing this currently:

if len(args) == 3 and args[1] == "tailwind" and args[2] in ["start", "build"]:
        execute_from_command_line([args[0], "tailwind", "install"])
...

execute_from_command_line(args) # run the initial command

Is there a cleaner way to go about this, maybe with an alternative pants target? Also, is there any way to inspect a pex?

Regarding inspecting a pex. It’s just a zip file so you can unpack it with regular tools.