I am working on a pants v2 plugin, is there a way to get pants to run it without pulling it down from pypi ? i.e. I need something similar to

pip -e ~/project/my-library-folder

but for

pants.toml

backend_packages2.add

I’m more familiar with how to develop plugins internally to Pants rather than in downstream repositories like Toolchain. So, if it were me, I’d start by developing in

pantsbuild/pants

and then move it over to wherever you want once you get the functionality working To develop a new backend_package in Pants, the main thing you need is a

register.py

in the directory you want, e.g.

pants.backend.python.lint.my_custom_linter

. Then, add

pants.backend.python.lint.my_custom_linter

to

backend_packages2

But, there might be a way to do the

pip -e

thing you’re referring to. Have you seen https://www.pantsbuild.org/howto_plugin.html already?

I looked at those docs... but I don't think they cover my use case (which might or might not be common). i.e. they suggest I use pants on the pants plugin project, which is fine... however, there will be a minimal amount of code in that repo... so it doesn't really provide a good way to test the plugin against a the a target large mono repo.... As for developing the plugin in the pants monorepo or in my monorepo, this will work fine for the first iteration... but as I release this plugin to pypi and want to iterate on it.... this becomes somewhat cumbersome. i.e. it seems to me that there is no reasonable dev flow for developing standalone/external plugin for pants that live in their own repos since those can't be installed locally and use from a monorepo that is using pants....

You could use

PYTHONPATH

to point it to your repo. See Toolchain’s

./pants_from_sources

script for how we load Pants plugins as loose source plugins, rather than pulling them from PyPI. For example, it looks like we register

../pants/contrib/awslambda/python/src/python

on

PYTHONPATH

and then we’re able to use

pants.contrib.awslambda.python

in

backend_packages

We must have a solution for in-repo plugins, at least no?