Is it possible with target selection to build everything BUT some list of targets? I am thinking about how to parallelize the build jobs on CI.

<shameless plug> By far the best way to get high concurrency in CI is to use a remote execution cluster such as the one offered by Toolchain. DM me for details! </shameless plug> Beyond that, you can shard tests with the

--test-shard

flag, as explained here: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/advanced-target-selection#sharding-the-input-targets And that also gives an idea of how to shard other goals. But note that this way, any work (e.g., compilation) required by tests across multiple shards will be performed multiple times, so this is one example of why remote execution is the better paradigm.

Benjy's answer is better if it applies, but to answer the raw question, some options are: • fiters https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/advanced-target-selection e.g. we something equivalent to

pants --filter-tag-regex=foo-bar-.* package ::

to only package targets that have

tags=["foo-bar-bar"]

or

tags=["foo-bar-123"]

(allowlist), and similarly

pants --filter-tag-regex=-foo-bar-.* package ::

to package everything except them (blocklist) •

-

prefix on a CLI target https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/goals#goal-arguments, e.g.

pants package :: -path/to/ignored:: -some/other:target

Thank you both. I might look into remote execution Server at some point; but I am still evaluating pants on a subset of our repo. If that goes well we might roll it out on the rest of the repo. Until then I am not willing to make an investment.