#17764 `export` Python virtualenvs with non-hermetic console scripts Issue created by danxmoran Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The virtualenvs generated by

./pants export

currently follow Pex's default of generating "hermetic" console scripts, by rewriting all the shebangs of scripts under

bin/

to pass

-sE

to

python

. This prevents the use of exported scripts with a custom

PYTHONPATH

, which breaks use-cases like running

pylint

with in-repo plugins and a custom source root. Describe the solution you'd like Pex 2.1.118 added a

--non-hermetic-scripts

option to the

venv

tool, which disables the addition of

-sE

to script shebangs. Pants could pass that flag when running the export logic. This should definitely be safe to do when exporting a non-symlinked venv. I'm not sure if it would be safe to do in the symlink case, since the virtualenv might also be used for other processes within Pants. Maybe this should be an option on the

export

goal-subsystem, with the caveat that if you enable it you will get worse caching performance out of the symlink mode. Describe alternatives you've considered I thought about writing a wrapper script around

./pants export

that re-re-writes the shebangs to remove

-sE

. I worry about the safety of doing this when using symlinked exports, since I'd be munging files within the Pants cache. To avoid munging data in the pants cache, the wrapper script would need to do something like: 1. Run

./pants export

with symlinking 2. Delete the top-level symlink under

dist/export

3. Recreate the directory structure of a virtualenv under

dist/export

in place of the deleted link 4. Within the virtualenv skeleton, link back to everything in the Pants-cache venv except for

bin/

5. Copy all the files from Pants-cache

bin/

to the virtualenv under

dist/export

, rewriting shebangs along the way I'm confident I could write such a script, but don't really want to if it turns out it's safe for Pants to always run with

--non-hermetic-scripts

😅 Additional context The

pylint

example might seem unrealistic since we'd typically want people to run

./pants lint

, but it is important for IDE integrations. We have other custom tools that do wacky things with

importlib

that are broken in the same way. pantsbuild/pants