Hi all. Is there any good practice for distributing "wheel" files with the pinned dependencies (similar to what Pants does with the

pex_binary

)? Currently, in our company, we do not have any

pex

registry and we publish our Python libraries/applications on an in-house PyPI registry. So, it is convenient to be able to publish our applications similar to our libraries by wheel files.

Have you tried

python_distributiob

?

Yes, I do. The

python_distribution

target generates wheel files using the raw requirements themselves (not the pinned requirements). But the

pex_binary

target uses the generated lock files. Am I wrong?

I'm on mobile, so I'm not sure exactly. You could use your own

setup.py

or

pyproject.toml

to specify whatever metadata you want

In that case, I should pin requirements myself, and it produces some duplications (requirements and properties) inside the

setup.py

file. I found a fairly good solution using the Pants documentation. What about depending

python_distribution

to a

pex_binary

target and register the

pex

file as a console

entry_point

(Pants

entry_point

supports

pex_binary

dependency). https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/python-distributions#using-a-generated-setuppy It has some pros and cons. The application doesn't depend on any other library and it could be installed safely without virtual-environment creation or Pipx. But its size will be very large.

@magnificent-hairdresser-5608, I did something similar recently. I agree about the size, but I found that much easier to deal with than pulling in a distribution and separately having to pip install it. The problem here is that a distribution isn't meant to have locked dependencies. It should be flexible so that others can pull it into their systems that have separate requirements that have to be resolved while taking your distribution into consideration. If you're wanting something to drop into a system with explicit dependencies, I have found pex much nicer to work with.

@high-yak-85899 Thanks. You're right. Finally, we decided to use the pex in the core and for each platform, use the standard packaging around it (for example, the Debian package and repository for Debian-based distributions).

Mind if I mark this ✅ ?

In my opinion, yes. Thanks 👍