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Getting Help

How to engage with the Pants community.

The Pants community is friendly, welcoming, and passionate about improving the craft of software engineering. If you need help with anything Pants-related, you've come to the right place. We'd love to hear from you!

How to get help​

Pants community members will do their best to answer any respectfully posed questions. General questions about Pants, its features, language support, roadmap etc. are always welcome!

If you need help debugging a specific problem you're encountering in your repo, then we ask that you help us to help you:

  1. First--before you ask for help--use these resources to find and try solutions others have used, posted, or documented, and any ongoing discussions related to your issue:
  2. If the tips and solutions you've tried have not resolved your issue, and you would like a Pants contributor to look at your problem, you need a way to demonstrate your problem.
    • The best way to show an issue is to provide a small public GitHub repo that reproduces the problem. The README.md in this repo should provide clear instructions on how to reproduce the problem, and the architecture and OS on which it can be reproduced.
    • Sometimes it's not possible to create a reproducer, e.g., when the issue is performance at scale in a proprietary repo, or a bug related to inconsistent behavior. In that case, it's still helpful to have as much info as possible, including the contents of pants.toml and relevant BUILD files, and the exact command line invocation.
  3. Either way, then file an issue that states the problem and the steps you've taken to attempt to solve it, and a link to the reproducer repo, if you've been able to create one. If you find an existing issue that seems relevant, please link to it, or post directly to that existing issue if you're reasonably sure it describes the same problem.
  4. Finally, reach out in the #general channel in Slack with a summary and a link to your issue, to kickstart the discussion. We're happy to help if we have all the information!

As an open-source project, we always appreciate a willingness to dive in and fix issues yourself (with our guidance), and to provide support to others in the future, once you're a more seasoned Pants user yourself. This is how open-source projects grow and thrive!

While we generally try to respond to all issues, unfortunately we cannot guarantee a response in every case, due to the volume of requests. If you would like your support requests to have a greater guarantee of a timely response, or if you would like help directly in a private repo (under NDA) we invite you to become a sponsor of Pants. Various tiers of sponsorship include the privilege of such extra support attention from Pants maintainers.

Or, if you want consistent help with Pants integration or feature development, you can reach out to one of the Pants service providers to enquire about their commercial offerings.

Where to get help​

Slack​

The best place to become acquainted with Pants community members, exchange informal chat and ask questions is at the project's Slack. You can join using this link.

We encourage you to introduce yourself in the #welcome channel!

Discussions​

The best place to ask deeper, long-term technical questions or hold design discussions is via the project's GitHub Discussions. While questions, feedback, and design discussions are equally welcome on Slack, we encourage you to choose Discussions whenever it's likely other users would benefit from persistent access to the conversation. GitHub Discussions is indexed by search engines, and its content is retained long-term, so this is opportunity to help your fellow Pants users by making it easier for folks to discover supplementary technical information beyond the docs.

Blog​

Read blog.pantsbuild.org to find elaboration on new features, tutorials, reveals of upcoming features, insights into what we're thinking about and working on, case studies, and behind-the-scenes interviews with Pants users and maintainers.

Mailing list​

You can join the [email protected] mailing list here. This is used mostly for announcements and for us to solicit user feedback.

GitHub Repository​

Pants is an open-source software project, developed at https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants.

If you discover a bug with Pants or have a feature request, feel free to file an issue. Please check first if a similar issue has already been filed; if it has, please comment so that we know to bump the issue in priority.

YouTube​

We also have a Pants Build YouTube channel with a variety of concise tutorials, introductions to core concepts, and tips. Subscribe to the channel to get notified of additions.

Have an idea or request for a future video topic? Bring it up on the Slack! We'd love to know what you're wondering about.

About us​

Learn more about the Pants community.