Using pip-tools with pants

[jorgegomezcq]

Hi,

Does it make sense to use pip-tools with pants?

[benjyw]

In what way? What would be an example use-case?

[jorgegomezcq]

Hi,

In what way? What would be an example use-case?

I'm mostly trying to understand workflows for managing and upgrading dependencies as a pants end user.

Let me ask a different question, is pip-tools not needed because pants has generate-lockfiles?

[kaos]

I have no experience with pip-tools but from a quick read on their GH page, it seems the answer to your question is "yes", it's not needed as your requirements.txt is used as inputs to produce a lockfile, which seems to be ~equivalent to pip-compile, and then there is pants export if you need a venv to work with or for your editor etc which seems to correspond to pip-sync.

[jorgegomezcq]

@kaos Thanks for the information.

For managing dependencies with pants is the recommended workflow for managing libraries to pin versions in a requirements.txt and then run pants generate-lockfiles? How do I revert to a previous set of dependencies that were once known to be working, for example? I should tag git commits with particular lock files, another example?

[kaos]

personally I try to avoid pinning dependencies in requirements.txt, that makes it super easy to upgrade them with a single command. but that only works well if you're using the latest of everything and regularly upgrades to keep it so, otherwise you end up with upgrading everything in a big bang manner and that is never preferable.

If you need to revert, then yes checkout a previous version of the lockfile. Using pins in requirements.txt may also be the way to go to have control over what gets upgraded when. Note however that transitive deps may or may not be pinned by your dependencies so if you regenerate the lockfile it may change even if you didn't change anything in requirements.txt (this would be true also for pip-compile etc)