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Version: 2.17 (deprecated)

Create a new goal

Getting started writing plugins for Pants by creating a new goal.

In this tutorial, you'll learn the basics needed to get started writing a plugin. You will create a new goal, project-version, which will tell you the version (retrieved from the VERSION text file) of a particular project in your monorepository. You will learn how to create a new custom target to refer to the VERSION file, how to author a new goal, and, most importantly, how to connect rules and targets.

You can follow along this tutorial in your own repository; you only need to be on a recent version of Pants and have a VERSION file containing a version string e.g. 1.2.3. If you do not have a repository with Pants enabled yet, you can use this example Python repository to work on the plugin.

Registering a plugin​

We'll be writing an in-repo plugin, and expect you to have the pants-plugins/project_version directory as well as the pants.toml file with this configuration:

pants.toml
# Specifying the path to our plugin's top-level folder using the `pythonpath` option:
pythonpath = ["%(buildroot)s/pants-plugins"]

backend_packages = [
  "pants.backend.python",
   ...
  "project_version",
]

Creating a new target​

Once you have become familiar with the core concepts of Targets and Fields, you are ready to create an own custom target that will represent the VERSION file:

pants-plugins/project_version/targets.py
from pants.engine.target import COMMON_TARGET_FIELDS, SingleSourceField, Target


class ProjectVersionTarget(Target):
    alias = "version_file"
    core_fields = (*COMMON_TARGET_FIELDS, SingleSourceField)
    help = "A project version target representing the VERSION file."

Our target has some common target fields such as tags and description available via the COMMON_TARGET_FIELDS; including those fields in your targets may be convenient if you decide to use tags and provide a description later. In addition, it also has the source field which will be used to provide path to the project's VERSION file.

We could add a custom field to provide a file path, however, there are multiple advantages to using the source field. You will learn more about them in the following tutorials.

In order to start using a target, you only need to register it:

pants-plugins/project_version/register.py
from typing import Iterable

from pants.engine.target import Target
from project_version.target_types import ProjectVersionTarget


def target_types() -> Iterable[type[Target]]:
    return [ProjectVersionTarget]

You can now run pants help version_file to learn more about the target:

❯ pants help version_file

`version_file` target
---------------------

A project version target representing the VERSION file.


Activated by project_version
Valid fields:

source
    type: str
    required

    A single file that belongs to this target.

    Path is relative to the BUILD file's directory, e.g. `source='example.ext'`.

...

You can now also add a target to the myapp/BUILD file:

version_file(
    name="main-project-version",
    source="VERSION",
)

Since you have registered the target, Pants will be able to "understand" it:

$ pants peek myapp:main-project-version
[
  {
    "address": "myapp:main-project-version",
    "target_type": "version_file",
    "dependencies": [],
    "description": null,
    "source_raw": "VERSION",
    "sources": [
      "myapp/VERSION"
    ],
    "tags": null
  }
]

Creating a goal​

Goals are the commands that Pants runs such as fmt or lint. Writing a plugin doesn't necessarily mean adding a new goal. Most users would likely only want to enrich their build metadata with new kinds of targets or extend behavior of existing Pants goals. See Common plugin tasks to learn more.

For the purposes of our tutorial, to be able to get a project version number (using a target we've just created), we need to create a new goal. The code below is the boilerplate necessary to create a goal, so it's not really necessary to understand how, for instance, subsystems work right now. The function decorated with the @goal_rule can be named anything, but it's helpful for the name to represent the functionality your goal provides. To make your goal part of the plugin's interface, add it to the rules function in the register.py module.

from pants.engine.goal import Goal, GoalSubsystem
from pants.engine.rules import collect_rules, goal_rule


class ProjectVersionSubsystem(GoalSubsystem):
    name = "project-version"
    help = "Show representation of the project version from the `VERSION` file."


class ProjectVersionGoal(Goal):
    subsystem_cls = ProjectVersionSubsystem
    environment_behavior = Goal.EnvironmentBehavior.LOCAL_ONLY


@goal_rule
async def goal_show_project_version() -> ProjectVersionGoal:
    return ProjectVersionGoal(exit_code=0)


def rules():
    return collect_rules()

You can now run pants project-version to confirm the command exits with the exit code 0.

At this point, we are ready to do something useful with the new target of ours. Goals generally run on targets, so they need to be passed as an argument in the command line. For instance, to format the myproject directory targets, you would run pants fmt myproject. To get the version of a project in your repository, it makes sense to pass to the project-version goal a project directory containing the version_file definition.

To make a target passed as an argument accessible in the goal rule, we pass the Targets as input arguments of the function along with the Console object so that we can print the details of our target in the user terminal:

@goal_rule
async def goal_show_project_version(console: Console, targets: Targets) -> ProjectVersionGoal:
    # since we don't know what targets will be passed (e.g. `::`),
    # we want to keep only `version_file` targets
    targets = [tgt for tgt in targets if tgt.alias == ProjectVersionTarget.alias]
    for target in targets:
        console.print_stdout(target.address.metadata())
    return ProjectVersionGoal(exit_code=0)

Having the following directory structure:

myapp
├── BUILD
└── VERSION

we are ready to inspect our new target:

$ pants project-version myapp
{'address': 'myapp:main-project-version'}

Writing a rule​

You can think of the @goal_rule as of the main function in your Python program where you would call various functions that your program needs to complete. For auxiliary code, it makes sense to place it into standalone functions which is what @rules are for.

Let's create a rule that will return a data structure that we'll use to represent our project version. Data classes work really well with Pants engine, so let's create one:

@dataclass(frozen=True)
class ProjectVersionFileView:
    path: str
    version: str

This is what our @rule function would return (for now without actually reading the VERSION file):

@rule
async def get_project_version_file_view(
    target: ProjectVersionTarget,
) -> ProjectVersionFileView:
    return ProjectVersionFileView(
        path="path", version="1.2.3"
    )

Now, we have our @goal_rule, but we cannot call the get_project_version_file_view function; it's Pants that will determine that a rule is used and will make a function call. Well, what should you do to tell Pants you need that rule executed? You should make a function call that:

  • passes an object of the type that matches the type of the rule's input arguments
  • requests an object of the type that a rule returns (you can see that in a type hint)

For this, you can use Get:

@goal_rule
async def goal_show_project_version(console: Console, targets: Targets) -> ProjectVersionGoal:
    targets = [tgt for tgt in targets if tgt.alias == ProjectVersionTarget.alias]
    for target in targets:
        project_version = await Get(ProjectVersionFileView, ProjectVersionTarget, target)
        console.print_stdout(project_version)
    return ProjectVersionGoal(exit_code=0)

Understanding that calling Get() is what causes a particular @rule to be executed is essential! It may feel awkward that you cannot run your function. However, by using the Get(), you are asking Pants to run your rule, and only knowing this will get you quite far!

Compare this Get() call with the rule signature:

# requesting an object of type "ProjectVersionFileView",
# passing an object of type "ProjectVersionTarget" in the variable "target"
Get(ProjectVersionFileView, ProjectVersionTarget, target)
# it requires an object of type "ProjectVersionTarget" and
# will return an object of type "ProjectVersionFileView"
@rule
async def get_project_version_file_view(target: ProjectVersionTarget) -> ProjectVersionFileView: ...
Understanding the requests and rules signatures

In our basic usage, there's a 1:1 match between the Get(output: B, input: A, obj) request and the @rule(input: A) -> B function signature. This doesn't have to be the case! When you make a request (providing an input type and asking for an output type), Pants looks at all the rules in the graph to find a way from the input to the output using all the available rules.

Let's consider a following scenario where you have a few @rules and a Get() request:

@rule
async def rule1(A) -> B: ...

@rule
async def rule2(B) -> C: ...

@goal_rule
async def main(...):
    result = await Get(C, A, obj)

With the following suite of rules, Pants will "figure out" that in order to return C, it's necessary to call rule1 first to get B and then once there's B, call rule2 to get C. This means you can focus on writing individual rules and leave the hard work of finding out the right order of calls that will need happen to Pants!

The project-version Pants goal now shows some useful information -- the target path along with a dummy version. This means our @rule was run!

$ pants project-version myapp
ProjectVersionFileView(path='myapp:main-project-version', version='1.2.3')

You would normally expect for a project to have only a single version_file target declared, so as an improvement, we could raise an exception if there are multiple targets of this type found within a single project. This is something we'll do in the following tutorials.

Reading the VERSION file​

Let's read the VERSION file and print the version number in the terminal. The source field of our target needs to be "hydrated". Reading a file is pretty straightforward as well. We use Get() to transform our inputs as needed. Knowing what class you need to request may be tricky, so make sure to review the documentation, and ask for help if you are stuck!

@rule
async def get_project_version_file_view(
    target: ProjectVersionTarget,
) -> ProjectVersionFileView:
    sources = await Get(HydratedSources, HydrateSourcesRequest(target[SourcesField]))
    digest_contents = await Get(DigestContents, Digest, sources.snapshot.digest)
    file_content = digest_contents[0]
    return ProjectVersionFileView(
        path=file_content.path, version=file_content.content.decode("utf-8").strip()
    )

If the @goal_rule would receive multiple version_file targets (which may happen if user would run the goal for multiple projects or provide a recursive glob pattern such as ::), it would be required to iterate over the list of targets. For efficiency, it is generally encouraged to replace the Get() calls in the for loop with a MultiGet() call:

@goal_rule
async def goal_show_project_version(console: Console, targets: Targets) -> ProjectVersionGoal:
    targets = [tgt for tgt in targets if tgt.alias == ProjectVersionTarget.alias]
    results = await MultiGet(
        Get(ProjectVersionFileView, ProjectVersionTarget, target) for target in targets
    )
    for result in results:
        console.print_stdout(str(result))
    return ProjectVersionGoal(exit_code=0)

Putting it all together​

Let's get all of this code in one place and see what happens!

from dataclasses import dataclass

from pants.engine.console import Console
from pants.engine.fs import DigestContents
from pants.engine.goal import Goal, GoalSubsystem
from pants.engine.internals.native_engine import Digest
from pants.engine.internals.selectors import Get, MultiGet
from pants.engine.rules import collect_rules, goal_rule, rule
from pants.engine.target import (HydratedSources, HydrateSourcesRequest,
                                 SourcesField, Targets)
from project_version.target_types import ProjectVersionTarget


@dataclass(frozen=True)
class ProjectVersionFileView:
    path: str
    version: str


@rule
async def get_project_version_file_view(
    target: ProjectVersionTarget,
) -> ProjectVersionFileView:
    sources = await Get(HydratedSources, HydrateSourcesRequest(target[SourcesField]))
    digest_contents = await Get(DigestContents, Digest, sources.snapshot.digest)
    file_content = digest_contents[0]
    return ProjectVersionFileView(
        path=file_content.path, version=file_content.content.decode("utf-8").strip()
    )


class ProjectVersionSubsystem(GoalSubsystem):
    name = "project-version"
    help = "Show representation of the project version from the `VERSION` file."


class ProjectVersionGoal(Goal):
    subsystem_cls = ProjectVersionSubsystem
    environment_behavior = Goal.EnvironmentBehavior.LOCAL_ONLY


@goal_rule
async def goal_show_project_version(
    console: Console, targets: Targets
) -> ProjectVersionGoal:
    targets = [tgt for tgt in targets if tgt.alias == ProjectVersionTarget.alias]
    results = await MultiGet(
        Get(ProjectVersionFileView, ProjectVersionTarget, target) for target in targets
    )
    for result in results:
        console.print_stdout(str(result))
    return ProjectVersionGoal(exit_code=0)


def rules():
    return collect_rules()

Running our goal:

$ /pants project-version myapp
ProjectVersionFileView(path='myapp/VERSION', version='0.0.1')

The VERSION file was read and its contents is shown in the console. Congratulations, you have now finished writing your first plugin!

There are a few things that we could do to improve it, though. We may want to check that the version string follows a semver convention, let user see the version in the console as a JSON object if desired, or show the version number string when exploring the version_file target via the peek Pants goal. This is something we'll do in the following tutorials!