and I was also wondering if someone decides to add support to a set of goals/targets, e.g.:

docker

/`docker-compose` if that would be easy to share as a separate package, sort of how

pytest

has it's own ecosystem with a bunch of other libraries that can be added as needed... That's just a thought that came across when I was thinking about maybe someone will want to add support to something that the pants community might not find that it fits / should live inside a "vanilla" pants and then they could still do it on their own repo.

You would activate it by adding

pants.backend.docker

to your

backend_packages

option. Is this what you mean?

but what if it was my library? For instance on my github:

thamenato/pants-docker

ohh I misread what you meant. We would absolutely love to have an ecosystem like Pytest, where you can publish your own plugins. This is possible with the

plugins

option. Adding something will download from PyPI and activate its backend package. but we don’t document that because there’s some infrastructure we still need to design. The biggest challenging is versioning. The Plugin API is not yet stable, so it’s not guaranteed a plugin written in 2.0.0 will work with Pants 2.1.0. Ideally, a plugin author can express which version(s) they’re compatible with. @chilly-magazine-21545 has an interesting proposal at https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10671

that reminds me that i should share my docker plugin as a gist

@flat-zoo-31952 that be amazing! I feel like for stuff such as

docker

and a couple of other CI tools folks might already have their own solution and having this way of sharing it and making that plugin better with open source would be the way to go.

checkout #plugins, i just posted the link there