I've been setting up a starter example, taking things in small steps, and I seem to have discovered a problem (this is all under WSL). The repo is here: https://github.com/BruceEckel/ConfiguringForPants The READMEs in each directory describe the steps that I took. The problem occurs in step2, where even though pants appears to be working,

./pants test ::

produces no results and

./pants run main/main.py

produces errors. Now the mysterious part: after copying the step2 directory to step3, making no other changes, the pants build to starts working inside the step3 directory.