Hi everyone, I'm new to Pants and am trying to learn / evaluate it for a potential project. One pattern we follow in the project is managing two separate requirement files

requirements.txt

and

requirements-dev.txt

. The first is for 3rd party dependencies we use in our application while the second is limited to

pytest

,

black

,

flake8

, and the like. When developing we have one

venv

that we can point VS Code . In addition to the code completion benefits we can use VS Code's Testing extension with python to easily set breakpoints when debugging tests. I ran

./pants export ::

but

pytest

isn't included as a dependency in the main

venv

it exported and I'm not sure how to use the exported

pytest

venv

as it's not able to import any of my code (I'm using a

src

style layout). I could just include

pytest

as a 3rd party dependency and specify

export = false

in my

pants.toml

but I don't want to ship

pytest

to production. How can I setup Pants so I can maintain install dependencies (e.g. pytest, typeshed, etc) to facilitate a good developer experience while ensuring I don't ship dev dependencies to production?

The exported venv comes with pip

Thanks! That makes sense

Also, importantly - in idiomatic Pants use you should think of your

requirements.txt

(and the lockfile you are hopefully generating from it) as a "universe" of allowed 3rdparty dependencies. But Pants will actually use just the actually needed subset from that universe. So if Pants is building your production binaries, you can safely have

pytest

etc in your

requirements.txt

, and it won't show up in production.

That was very helpful, thank you!