How to build python project based on pyproject.toml

Question

I would like to understand current state of Python build systems and requirements management.

Imagine, that I checked out sources of some project that is using poetry (or pipenv). And this project has pyproject.toml file with build system specified. Of course I can look into pyproject, see that this one is using Poetry, install poetry and run poetry install , but I would like to avoid it.

Question: Is there a build-system-agnostic way to build Python project?

By "build" I mean install all the necessary requirements for the project to be run in-place.

With requirements.txt I would achieve that by running pip install -r requirements.txt .

Answer 1

To install the project (and its dependencies), recent versions of pip are perfectly capable of doing this:

path/to/python -m pip install path/to/project

or

path/to/python -m pip install --editable path/to/project

To build distributions of the project, currently pep517 is the only build-system-agnostic tool I know of (current pip vendors it, so I believe this is what it uses internally):

path/to/python -m pep517.build path/to/project

Answer 2

Check out the tutorials section of Python's official documentation on packaging. Using pip and a setup.py file is the de facto standard for most Python projects.

There is no universal way to build Python projects that is independent of its build system.