The

export

goal is confusing me a bit. It accepts an (undocumented?)

python_requirement(s)

target as its first argument, and then prints a message suggesting it is building a venv from only the requirements specifically owned by that target, with versions obtained from the resolve it too references. But then it proceeds to export the entire resolve in dist/export/python/virtualenvs. Exporting the entire resolve is what I'm after, but it means as the cmd works now, you can get that behavior by exporting any

python_requirement

target that references the resolve. By chance do resolves themselves have implicitly defined targets that I can refer to instead (for clarity in shell scripts)? The reason I am bringing this up at all is because if I

./pants export

without any target, it only exports virtualenvs for the toolset (mypy, black, etc.), so seems I need to do it this way (as an aside: it proceeds to export all the tool venvs anyway, but at least I get the resolve's venv I wanted 🙂 it just takes a little extra time 😞 )

There's

./pants export ::

if export for all your resolves are ok. Also, to not export venv for tools, theres a option per tool, like

[black].export = false

Thank you Andreas, didn't know about those options. The reason for having to write the lockfile to disk (for

generate-lockfiles

) is because Pex would try to resolve it from PyPI instead of internal repo (there is some thread about it, not sure if it's even relevant anymore in v2.13). I assume this option only applies to

export

goal and not

generate-lockfiles

Regarding the first point, I'm still confused about what Pants is actually trying to do. When you supply a target, it prints a message indicating it will only export the subset of the resolve that is directly referenced by the

python_requirements

target, but then it writes the entire resolve (which is a good thing, but it's confusing because 1) the contradictory info msg and 2) if you have multiple

python_requirements

participating in a resolve, then you have to make a conscious choice of which one to "export" (either will do, as either leads to the resolve being exported), which is a bit odd feeling.

Hey, yeah,

export

may be a bit of a mess, or at least, poorly documented. As far as I can tell from the code (I wrote this but don't remember all the details)

./pants export <targets>

will export the requirements needed (directly or indirectly) by those targets. They don't have to be

python_requirements

targets.

Possibly export should be reworked to take the lockfile name(s) as an argument.

Yes, it should. Behave like generate-lockfiles. It's way too hard to quickly on the CLI say you only want one specific lockfile exported

export

was added before lockfiles were fully a thing, so the CLI semantics weren't optimized for it