Hello! I've got a few, hopefully simple, questions that I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction for. Question 1: I have an existing scrapy project I'm trying to put into a pex. Before pex, I would run

scrapy runspider myproj/spider/myspider.py

but now I've got:

python_library()

pex_binary(
     name="bin",
     entry_point="scrapy.cmdline:execute"
)

which will execute scrapy but I can't figure how to pass the

runspider myproj/spider/myspider.py

Question 2: Is there a python plugin (or command I missed) that will generate a virtualenv for local development? In the example above I can use pants to generate a pex, but can I use pants to build a virtualenv so I can hack on the project as well? I know I can take a pex and turn that into a virtualenv but was wondering if this is built in

Hi! For question 1, you probably want to use a console script. If you use Pants 2.8.0rc3, you can set

script="scrapy"

on the

pex_binary

, and it will be like you're running

scrapy

normally on the CLI To start with trying things out, you could do this:

pex_binary(
   name="scrapy",
   dependencies=["//:scrapy"],  # or `3rdparty/python:scrapy` etc
   script="scrapy",
)

Then

./pants package

, and run the resulting PEX directly on your code

8 days ago, great timing