Concepts

How we get quick feedback on new features via "experimental" backends

Pants balances release velocity and end-user stability via judicious use of deprecation cycles. Experimental backends are a way to get quick feedback on new functionality, before "graduating" it to the formal deprecation policy. Experimental features are still well-supported, and not to be feared!

Case Studies Featured

Case Study: Introducing Pants to Oxbotica

A year in, builds take only a few minutes (~150K LOC, ~1500 tests), PRs have become smaller as devs no longer try to squeeze as much as code as possible into a single change, code reviews get completed much faster (and are more likely to provide useful feedback), development velocity has increased…

Community Featured

Celebrating two years of Pants 2

Pants 2's design incorporated many lessons learned from the first version of Pants, and many of its contemporary build systems. On Pants 2's 2nd anniversary, we return to some of the earliest decisions we made when rewriting Pants and look back at how they've helped us evolve at a remarkable pace…

Concepts Featured

Dependency inference: Pants's special sauce

Unlike earlier build systems, Pants v2 automatically infers your code's internal and external dependencies. And it does this at the file level, so that you get optimal invalidation, caching, and concurrency performance without having to manually create and maintain mountains of BUILD file metadata.

Language Support > JVM Featured

Pants 2.14: Less boilerplate, more Rust, better support for Go monorepos, interactive debugging support, and more!

Highlights include: less boilerplate via hierarchical defaults for target field values, better Golang monorepo support, with multiple `go.mod`s, do more of your workflows in Pants with the experimental `deploy` goal (with initial support for Helm), and much more…

CI/CD

Skipping GitHub Actions jobs while keeping branch protection rules that require them

How we worked around some quirks and limitations of GitHub Actions to skip CI jobs that aren't necessary in certain scenarios, without breaking branch protection rules that normally require those CI jobs to succeed.

Concepts Featured

Visualize your dependencies with Graph My Repo

To make it easier to understand the value and power of dependency inference, Toolchain (the lead sponsor of Pants) has built a new site: Graph My Repo. As its name suggests, Graph My Repo shows you an interactive graph of a public GitHub repo of your choice…

Community > Meet the Team

Meet our newest Maintainer: A. Alonso Dominguez

I was born in the early 80's in a small fishing town in the Spanish Atlantic Coast, far away from the big urban sprawls and common traits of miles-long beaches, year-round summertime and chill out vibes normally identified with life in Spain. This is the autonomous region named Galicia…

Language Support > Python Featured

Pants 2.13: Easier at the command line, easier parallel execution in CI, Kotlin support, and better Python and JVM support!

We're pleased to announce Pants 2.13.0. Highlights include better command line arguments for file sets, improved JVM support, easier access to parallel execution in CI, and lower barriers to adoption for Python projects that currently use existing distribution and build tools.

Case Studies Featured

Astranis Case Study: Wrangling Python In a Monorepo

"Code development at Astranis has been migrating towards a monorepo structure. Astranis has grown rapidly since this migration started and, along with it, so has the volume of Python hosted in our monorepo. We went looking for new tooling to bring us into the future."

Concepts

Monorepository linting via Pants's project introspection

Pantsbuild provides a common interface to run all code quality tools in parallel. This post explores how Pants augments excellent linters such as bandit, flake8, shellcheck, etc. by offering its own linting mechanisms, too, including regex matches, dependency analysis, and metadata checks.

Tools > Docker

Optimizing Python + Docker deploys using Pants

Pants can build a PEX file, an executable zip file containing your Python code and all transitive dependencies. Deploying your application is as simple as copying the file. This post elaborates on how to get best performance out of the powerful combination of Pants+PEX+Docker.

CI/CD Featured

Better CI/CD caching with Pants

Pants is designed to utilize fine-grained caching to speed up builds. Users are often interested in how this interacts with CI providers' own caching features, which are necessary since CI jobs typically run in fresh containers, with no direct access to previous state. In particular, we get questions about how

Language Support > JVM Featured

Pants 2.12: Improved performance for common cases, IDE support for Java and Scala

We're pleased to announce Pants 2.12.0 [https://www.pantsbuild.org/v2.12/docs], the latest release of Pants: the scalable and ergonomic build system. To update, set pants_version = "2.12.0" in your pants.toml. See upgrade tips [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/upgrade-tips] for more information.

Under The Hood

How we streamlined Apple M1 Support with self-hosted Github Actions runners

We ended up setting up a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner, on a hosted Mac M1. Getting the machine itself up and running was easy, thanks to MacStadium's simple, effective UX. But setting up the GHA runner on it was a little trickier, for a couple of reasons...

Concepts

Multiple lockfiles in Python repos

Rather than forcing global or per-project lockfiles, Pants uses a hybrid approach...This allows a repo to operate with the minimum number of lockfiles required to support their conflicting library versions, without necessarily going to the costly extreme of per-project lockfiles.

Release Announcements Featured

Pants 2.11 adds Go Protobuf codegen, Pex lockfiles for Python, and parametrization

We're pleased to announce Pants 2.11.0, the latest release of Pantsbuild, the scalable and ergonomic build system. To update, set pants_version = "2.11.0" in your pants.toml. See upgrade tips [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/upgrade-tips], including the update-build-files goal to automate some of the upgrade.

Under The Hood

Talk Notes: PyCon US 2022 – Hermetic Environments in Pantsbuild

On Sunday 1 May 2022, Pants Maintainer, Christopher Neugebauer gave a talk about Pantsbuild's hermetic environments. Here are some useful resources: * Example Python repo [https://github.com/pantsbuild/example-python] — the codebase where you can run the demos from the start of the talk. * Stu Hood – Faster incremental builds with Speculation

Release Announcements Featured

Pants 2.10 adds multiple Python lockfile support, PyOxidizer, Thrift codegen, and better linter parallelization

We're pleased to announce Pants 2.10.0, the latest release of Pantsbuild, the scalable and ergonomic build system. To update, set pants_version = "2.10.0" in your pants.toml. See upgrade tips [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/upgrade-tips], including the update-build-files goal to automate some of the upgrade.

Community

The 2022 annual community survey is a wrap, and the results are in!

We recently conducted our annual survey [https://groups.google.com/g/pants-devel/c/UFt3Os--6ps/m/FCjGTnlRBQAJ] of the Pants community. The purpose, as usual, was to inform the project roadmap for the year. The survey proceeded in two phases: First, we gathered all the potential projects and needs from the

Concepts

Effective monorepos with Pants

Working effectively in a monorepo requires appropriate tooling. While Pants can be a really useful system in repos of all sizes and architectures, it has some features that make it particularly appealing in a monorepo setting…

Concepts

The monorepo approach to code management

If you’re responsible for your organization’s codebase architecture, then at some point you have to make some emphatic choices about how to manage this growth in a scalable way. There are two common architectural alternatives to choose from...

Codegen

Pants 2.10 adds Apache Thrift support for Python

Pants's codegen support solves one of the biggest problems with code generation: how to make sure that local developers, CI, and production are using the same generated code?

Community > Meet the Team

Meet our newest Maintainer: Alexey Tereshenkov

This month, the Pants core maintainers voted to invite Alexey Tereshenkov to become a Maintainer. This is a trusted role earned through demonstrating a long-term interest in Pants, by people who make regular contributions for some time and who plan to continue to do so. Maintainers conduct code reviews of

Language Support > Python

Packaging Python with the PyOxidizer Pants Plugin

Alliterations aside, this post discusses the new PyOxidizer integration coming in Pants 2.10 for packaging Python applications.