Hello! I am having some troubles with the

files

target in Pants v2.X I have the following files (see screenshot), as well as the following BUILD file:

python_library(
    name='test-handler',
    sources=[
        'lambda_handler/test.py',
        ':test-queries'
    ],
    dependencies=[],
)

python_awslambda(
    name='test-lambda',
    dependencies=[
        ':test-handler',
    ],
    runtime='python3.8',
    handler='test.lambda_handler.test:handler',
    output_path='lambda/test/test.zip'
)

pex_binary(
    name='test-pex',
    dependencies=[
        ':test-handler',
    ],
    entry_point='test.lambda_handler.test:handler',
    output_path='lambda/test/test-pex.zip'
)

files(
    name='test-queries',
    sources=[
        'queries/test.sql'
    ]
)

The objective is to include some SQL files in an AWS lambda target. However, when I unzip the final artefacts, the SQL files are not included (as shown by the screenshot). We started having this issue since the migration from 1.30 to 2.0. How can I include files in an AWS lambda target?

Hi @many-agent-62725! You're hitting a problem that another user experienced last month and we haven't figured out a great answer for.

files()

targets currently are not included when creating a

pex_binary

and

python_awslambda

because loading the files usually does not work how you would expect: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/11551 It's not totally clear what we should do, but at a minimum, I think we should warn in this case For your specific use case, could you use

resources

instead of

files

? Those do work great with

pex_binary

and

python_awslambda

https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/resources

Ohhhh, I see! Yup, if I use resources it starts working again, thanks 🙏

Could you elaborate a little bit more about this, please?

See https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/11551#issuecomment-777926798. Because we strip source roots (like

src/py

) when packaging a PEX/AWS Lambda, using

__file__

behaves inconsistently depending on

./pants run

vs.

./pants package

(were we to allow files to be included in

./pants package

)

in what cases should file be used? When using archive?

Yeah, I think

files()

should only be for the

test

goal and the

archive

target type as far as I can tell

is this behaviour documented?

The part about not including

files

is not documented, which is our bad. I started to address it last month with that PR #11511 to allow using

files

with

pex_binary

, but it stalled because there are lots of gotchas and it's not clear we should actually do it But, for all Pants releases before the current dev release of 2.4, we're not going to backport this change, so I'll go ahead and tighten up the documentation now

Because we strip source roots (like 

src/py

) when packaging a PEX/AWS Lambda

Ahhh, OK, now I get it 😄