How does pants doeal with symlinks?

it doesn’t currently support them. you can configure pants to ignore the paths where symlinks are, but Pants does not currently know how to snapshot a symlink in order to replicate it with the execution sandbox. see https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/13122 and https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/13284. https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10271 covers potentially supporting symlinks in the future as the Remote Execution API does support them.

Okay thanks, good to know!

@some-farmer-97614 if you have a use-case for symlinks can you mention it on https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10271 ?

Thanks. In my case I’ll work around the restriction. Maybe symlinks weren’t the best option to begin with for it.

to be clear: Pants will capture the content of symlinks as long as they are within the repository

So in the sandbox your symlinks will be turned into regular files, and only if the content the symlinks pointed to was in the repo, and not elsewhere on the system

Symlinks handling is an issue for many build tools. I wonder if "How Pants' sandbox handles symlinks" should be a new section, or even page, somewhere in the docs. Right now the only mention is in https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/reference-pex#advanced-options

agreed. has been on my todo list for a while

Do you have time to dump the main points from this thread into an appropriate place? It can always be elaborated on some other time.

it’s going to need to stay in the queue at least another week.

That's not bad