hello community 👋 I am trying to use a cli tool (defined as a 3rd party python dependency i.e. not in the system path) with the run goal, with little success so far. Tried with

run_shell_command

target, however the tool must be already available in my path (e.g., using an exported venv ) for this to work. That beats the purpose IMO as I can interact with the tool directly in that case. Any suggestions on how to do this? Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure if this would work for your use case, but what we've done is define

pex_binary

targets in a

tools/BUILD

file. Then we can do

pants run tools:$tool_name

. e.g. something like:

pex_binary(
    name="http",
    entry_point="httpie.__main__:main",
    dependencies=[
        "3rdparty/python#httpie",
    ]
)

and then

pants run tools:http

. Theoretically, you could also invoke it directly with

pants run "3rdparty/python#httpie"

but that doesn't always work if pex doesn't know the right entrypoint. It's also useful to have the ability to specify multiple dependencies/plugins. An annoyance is that you have to put all the args after

--

e.g.:

pants run tools:http -- PUT <http://httpbin.org/put|httpbin.org/put> hello=world

hah, running directly the requirement is a nice trick 👌. Tried the pex binary angle as well, unfortunately neither works in this case, getting

ImportError: No module named feast.__main__; 'feast' is a package and cannot be directly executed

my current (dirty) workaround is a python script invoking the cli with

subprocess.run

It should work if you set the right entry point. There’s also a way to do that via an override in requirements

It does work! This is what I did:

pex_binary(
    name="feast",
    entry_point="feast.cli",
    execution_mode="venv",
    dependencies=["python/feast:reqs"],
)

Awesome, thanks for the help @dazzling-pizza-75442 🙏