Hi, I am trying to find out whether editable installs as specified in PEP 660 or as supported by setuptools are supported by pants or how something similar can be achieved using pants.

Editable installs are complicated in the pants world - they don't play nicely with repeatable, hermetic builds (think about how they would interact with caching...)

Hey, I had to think about this a bit. I think for the first use case, it's fine to have restart the repl after doing some changes, I don't even know if venv is able to patch into a running one. I think import will always have to be called again. For running the commands, I think it's fine to just run them using

./pants run

. I checked it out and I was afraid before that it would have to build the cache again after a change, but the second run even with code changes in between is super fast. One question there. Is there a way to define a target to be callable for example as

./pants run main-app

instead of

./pants run project/src/apps/main:main-app

or something similar? For the second use case, I think it would also already work using the

./pants run

command, if we mount the cache into the docker container 🤔 Here the ideal workflow (as it happens right now) is that we start up our docker container (with mounted code dir) with interactive shell and on startup a venv is created and activated that has editable installs of our code in there. I can now run a command like

main-app

if it's defined as an entry-point in e.g. my

setup.py

. I now see, that I need to change something to the code, can do that outside the container and run the command inside the container again (which will have the latest changes included). Pants could be used here to generate setup.py files that allow for the editable install or even allow you to extend the

export

command to allow you to also do editable installs into the exported venv. But I think with the pants-cache mounted as well, we could call

./pants run sth

instead of the direct call through venv and deal with it having to cache the dependencies etc once for each command. That is pretty much equivalent to the purpose that the venv basically serves (to have the dependencies loaded and apps ready to be executed). This is probably the more compatible solution here.

Re the command-line shortcuts, you can define aliases using this option: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/reference-cli , if you don't mind hardcoding a list of aliases in config.

Awesome, thanks, will try those options! 👍 I think the aliases will be very useful