2. I don't want to build 3rd party dependencies every time I make a change in our code. Is this the way to do it properly? I'm a little bit confused because the docker plugin may seem to be advertised like a thin wrapper around pex both in docker reference and in Benjy's post (I'm not trying to offend, just describing my experience)

You shouldn't have to, in that the 3rdparty requirements part of your pex should be retrieved from cache. Or is this in a CI environment where there is no cache?

Thanks for the fast reply! To be clear: I'm talking about building the pex. What I'm observing is that it takes 30-60 secs to build it (though there are 50+ dependencies - maybe it's expected?). I do have pip cache, and the deps are retrieved from it (they aren't getting downloaded over and over again). And I do have Pants cache, and from my perspective if I wait so much, then either the deps aren't retrieved from it, or it doesn't work as I expect it to. And the existence of the Joshua Cannon's method with splitting one

pex_binary

in two (deps only and sources only) suggests the second option (at least out of the box, with a single pex)

How big is the resulting pex? 30-60 secs is probably just the time it takes to zip up the file.

No, I'll try it

@happy-kitchen-89482 did you mean a "packed" PEX? Venv is the execution mode, zipapp/packed is the layout

Ugh, I did, yes