We have a pre-built

.whl

file which we have added to our repo because it is particularly complex to build from source. This works fine if I use an absolute path as the requirement but can not find a way to make it work with relative paths.

python_requirement(
    name="assimulo",
    requirements=[
        "assimulo@ file:////path/to/3rdparty/python/wheel/Assimulo-trunk-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl"
    ],
)

python_requirement(
    name="assimulo",
    requirements=[
        "assimulo@ wheel/Assimulo-trunk-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl"
    ],
)

Is there a known path forward to use a relative path to a .whl as a requirement?

The key concept that makes this all a bit more clear is that Pants runs all processes in a sandbox (off in /tmp). As such relative paths only work if you include the target of the path in the sandbox, and you do this by dependending on files in BUILD files. If that's enough to get you rolling, I'll stop. If you need more I can spray beta.

Ah - I hardcoded the absolute paths when I first started playing around with pants and have just came back to it today when the path didn't exist on a coworkers machine 🙂 . Now that I know more about how pants works, I think I know what you are getting at. I'll give it a go on my end. Thanks!

Hrm, you may run into Pants nannying here unfortunately. So, Pip does not require

... @ url

style requirements. You can just pass it a relative path directly with no adornment. Pants may balk though.

Yeah - running into how different tooling handles relative paths. Trying out a few more things. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/6658)

I think the only way to do this today is by adding a find_links repo.

Ok - appreciate the help!

You want this: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/reference-python-repos#section-repos combined with this: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/options#config-file-entries

Will give this a go

So, in `pants.toml`:

[python-repos]
repos = ["%(buildroot)s/3rdparty/python/wheel"]

And then to depend on wheels there use normal requirement strings.

Exactly ... no .whl on pypi 👍

Ok. You probably still want the dependency on the wheel file though to fake invalidation. Without that, you'd upgrade the contents of the 3rdparty/python/wheel dir but the

[python-repos] repos

option would not change; nor would your requirement string necessarily, and Pants would no-op.

Ah - ok that makes sense

Well, you could specify the exact version in the requirement string, that would invalidate fine, right?

It would, but his example doesn't have that (

3rdparty/python/wheel/Assimulo-trunk-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl)

. Ideally the Pip relative path syntax approach and the Pip requirements supporting $PWD approach would be supported. But, IIRC we have issues tracking those and we're just not there yet.

I actually ended up updating my local setup such that the .whl was built with the version number correctly, as @happy-kitchen-89482 was getting at.

Good - that seems a bit easier to grok as a whole for random Betty looking at all this later.

To summarize the solution, adding the find-links repo allowed me to simply add

Assimulo==3.2

to

3rdparty/python/requirements.txt

That seems reasonably intuitive, great