Manual installation

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This page describes an old, deprecated method for installing Pants.

We highly recommend using the pants launcher binary instead.

Manual installation

This installation method requires Python 3.7, 3.8, or 3.9 discoverable on your PATH. On macOS on Apple Silicon (M1/M2), it must be Python 3.9.

Pants is invoked via a launch script named ./pants , saved at the root of the repository. This script will install Pants and handle upgrades.

First, pick a release version. You can see the available releases on PyPI. We recommend picking the current stable release, unless you have reason to need a more recent one, such as a release candidate or a development release.

Then, set up a minimal pants.toml config file, filling in the version you selected:

printf '[GLOBAL]\npants_version = "X.Y.Z"\n' > pants.toml

Then, download the script:

curl -L -O https://static.pantsbuild.org/setup/pants && chmod +x ./pants

Now, run this to bootstrap Pants and to verify the version it installs:

./pants --version

Add ./pants to version control

You should check the ./pants script into your repo so that all users can easily run Pants.

Upgrading Pants

The ./pants script will automatically install and use the Pants version specified in pants.toml, so upgrading Pants is as simple as editing pants_version in that file.

Running Pants from unreleased builds

To use an unreleased build of Pants from the pantsbuild/pants main branch, locate the main branch SHA, set PANTS_SHA=\<SHA> in the environment, and run ./pants as usual:

PANTS_SHA=8553e8cbc5a1d9da3f84dcfc5e7bf3139847fb5f ./pants --version

Building Pants from sources

We currently distribute Pants for Linux (x86_64 and ARM64) and macOS (x86_64 and ARM64).

If you need to run Pants on some other platform, such as Alpine Linux, you can try building it yourself by checking out the Pants repo, and running ./pants package src/python/pants:pants-packaged to build a wheel.