Benjy Weinberger - Pantsbuild Open Source Community Blog

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Benjy Weinberger

Co-creator of Pants. Co-founder of Toolchain. I used to be with it, until they changed what 'it' was.

A ski jumper in a black suit and green helmet in mid-air with alpine mountains in the background

The pants launcher binary - a much simpler way to install and run Pants

TL;DR Ensuring that an appropriate Python interpreter is available for running Pants has always been a stumbling block. Now Pants embeds its own interpreter and you don't have to worry about it! With the new pants launcher binary, developing, publishing and using Pants gets a whole lot easier. Why

A woman in a white lab coat and safety googles dropping a liquid from a dropper into a test tube

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!

A visualization of a directed acyclic graph with about seventy vertices

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.

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

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.

A screenshot of the graphmyrepo.com website, visualizing the structure of the Pants codebase.

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…

Better CI/CD caching with Pants

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

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

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...

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

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

Effective monorepos with Pants

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…

The monorepo approach to code management

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...

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Community > Meet the Team

Meet our newest Maintainer: Joshua Cannon

The Pants Maintainers [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/maintainers] are a group of people with an ongoing commitment to Pants, who help manage and steer the project. Maintainers are a subgroup within the wider Contributor [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/the-pants-community#contributors] population. I'm very pleased to introduce the latest

Happy new year!

Happy new year!

Hi Pants community, 2021 was another massive year for the project, even as the pandemic continued to disrupt our lives in so many challenging ways. We grew our Python user base significantly, engaged in critical developer relations [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/media] efforts, gained new community members, including several

Pants vs. Bazel: Why Pants may be the right choice for your team

Getting Started Featured

Pants vs. Bazel: Why Pants may be the right choice for your team

Many considerations go into evaluating and adopting a new build system: performance, scalability language and framework support, ease of adoption and use, extensibility, compatibility with existing practices, and more.…

Pants supports PEP 517

Language Support > Python

Pants supports PEP 517

> TL;DR The upcoming Pants 2.8 release has greatly improved support [https://www.pantsbuild.org/v2.8/docs/python-distributions] for packaging Python distributions (sdists and wheels), including native extensions, by leveraging PEP 517. Pants has industry-leading support for Python builds - covering steps such as resolving 3rd-party dependencies, running

Streamline your Docker builds with Pants

Streamline your Docker builds with Pants

> TL;DR Pants makes it easy and efficient to incrementally build and deploy multiple Docker images from a single repo, with a single command. Each image can consist of a shared base image plus a single PEX (Python EXecutable) file containing all the code, resources and dependencies required by the

Meet our newest Maintainer: Andreas Stenius

Community > Meet the Team

Meet our newest Maintainer: Andreas Stenius

Andreas lives in Visby, the main city of Gotland, which in turn is the biggest island in Sweden, and home to world-famous rauks. He is mostly self-taught as a developer, and has experience working with embedded systems and hardware engineering.

It's PyCon US Time!

It's PyCon US Time!

PyCon US, the largest Python conference in the world, is getting under way (online-only this year), and Pants has a strong presence this year! * On Friday at 9:15 AM PDT Pants contributor Benjy Weinberger [https://twitter.com/benjy] (that's me!) will be speaking about some of the cool and

Introducing Pants Build 2.4.0

Release Announcements Featured

Introducing Pants Build 2.4.0

The latest stable release [https://pypi.org/project/pantsbuild.pants/2.4.0/] of Pants is out! This version introduces opt-in anonymous telemetry [https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/anonymous-telemetry], to provide the Pants maintainers with data to help detect and fix bugs and drive development decisions. We've gone to great

Introducing Pants Build 2.3.0

Release Announcements Featured

Introducing Pants Build 2.3.0

I'm psyched to announce that the latest stable release [https://pypi.org/project/pantsbuild.pants/] of the Pants Build System, 2.3.0, is out now. A major highlight of this release is the tailor goal, which generates BUILD file boilerplate for you [https://blog.pantsbuild.org/tailoring-pants-to-your-codebase/]! This makes

Tailoring Pants to your codebase

Release Announcements

Tailoring Pants to your codebase

TL;DR The tailor goal, newly available in Pants 2.3.0, generates BUILD file boilerplate for you, making adopting Pants easier than ever! Pants is a powerful system that brings speed and stability to your builds thanks to features such as fine-grained invalidation, caching, and concurrent execution. These features

Talking Pants

Pants contributors Eric Arellano [https://github.com/Eric-Arellano] and Stu Hood [https://github.com/stuhood] sat down recently with Tobias Macey, host of the popular Podcast.__init__, to talk about Python monorepos and how Pants supports them. Listen in to learn about the history of Pants (including the origin of

Introducing Pants v2

Release Announcements Featured

Introducing Pants v2

There are so many tools in the Python development ecosystem. Installing, configuring and orchestrating them—all while not re-executing work unnecessarily—is a hard problem, especially as your codebase grows. Fortunately, there is now a tailor-made (pun intended) solution: Pants v2!