pex itself can resolve against an exploded sdist dir.. but that support isn’t well plumbed in pants without hacks. with the standalone

pex

tool, you could do something like

pex ./my_cython_project -o /tmp/the.pex

and it would invoke an existing cythonized

setup.py

to create a bdist and then bundle that etc. but

pex

by itself doesnt permit bundling of arbitrary sources like pants does etc so there are some tradeoffs.