Hey, y'all! I wanted to try to clarify something that I haven't been able to wrap my head around yet. I'm pretty new to pants. For tools that I might want to use during development (black, ruff, mypy, etc.), I can invoke them with

pants fmt

or

pants lint

, but is there a way to use those tools directly without adding them explicitly to my 3rd-party dependencies? I tested adding them to my requirements, using

pants export

to get a venv, and then calling them inside of that, but wouldn't that mean two different versions to keep up with? Is there some way to just call whatever version of, say, black is installed when I add black to

backend_packages

?

Like this? https://www.pantsbuild.org/2.22/docs/using-pants/setting-up-an-ide#tool-virtualenvs

I think so, although I'm having a hard time making that more tangible. What does that export command look like? Is there a specific argument to

--resolves

for tools? Or something else?

So, something like this: https://www.pantsbuild.org/2.22/docs/python/overview/lockfiles#sharing-lockfiles-between-tools-and-code You have your requirements which

generate-lockfiles

puts into a

python-default

resolve (for example), and then in the

black

or whatever subsystem, you

install_from_resolve

requirements

black
fastapi

pants.toml

[python]
enable_resolves = true
interpreter_constraints = ["==3.9.*"]

[python.resolves]
python-default = "build-support/lockfiles/python-default.lock"

[black]
install_from_resolve = "python-default"

pants generate-lockfiles --resolve=python-default
pants fmt ::
pants export --resolve=python-default

source dist/export/python/virtualenvs/python-default/3.9.19/bin/activate      
python -c "import black"

Thank you, I really appreciate it! Just to make sure, there's no way to export the version of black that's already used by the subsystem without going the install_from_resolve route?

I don't want to claim that - as I thought that was possible, but not sure off the top of my head

What does "use those tools directly" mean, as opposed to calling them via

pants fmt

?

Some editors (neovim, helix) like to invoke formatting through a CLI command's stdin/stdout. I'm not sure, but I'm assuming

pants fmt

doesn't provide that as an option? Not that I would really expect a general-purpose (and context-dependent) formatting command to do that.

I see, so you want the editor to invoke via

python -m mylinter

or similar, but use the same version of mylinter that Pants uses?

Exactly! But a custom lockfile wasn't very much trouble after all, so no big deal either way.

This is relevant: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/20730

Awesome, thanks for the heads-up!

Should then our docs be updated? • If you want Pants to use your custom versions, use this • If you want to export Pant's default versions, use this ?