Twitter has released Version 1.0.0 of a Python build tool called Pants, an open source build tool for monorepo-style source repositories.

The tool is aimed at larger code bases that maven and ant can't deal with, according to the developers, who say it is designed for codebases that:

• Are large and/or growing rapidly
  
  
• Consist of many subprojects that share a significant amount of code
  
  
• Have complex dependencies on third-party libraries
  
  
• Use a variety of languages, code generators and frameworks

Pants supports an interesting range of languages in addition to Python, including Scala, Java, JavaScript, Go, C/C++, Thrift, protobuf, and Android code.

It also works well with IntelliJ. According to a post on the Twitter blog,

"Many developers at Twitter use IntelliJ and the IntelliJ Pants plugin imports Pants projects in a way IntelliJ understands."

Pants was used internally at Twitter before being released to the open source community, and continues to be Twitter's build tool of choice. The tool has a plugin API that has been stabilized for this release, enabling caching by default, and removing some unnecessary configuration to make setup easier.

Twitter began developing Pants to give it a way to maintain code in large single monorepo repositories, where standard build tools experienced performance degradation as the codebase grew and builds became more complex. Pants has been developed to cope well with large monorepos through the use of techniques including a distributed cache, concurrent task execution, incremental compilation, and fine-grained dependency management.

The 1.0.0 release has a stabilized plugin API, caching enabled by default, and some unnecessary configuration has been removed to make setup easier.

More Information

Pants Documentation

Twitter Blog

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