Python’s poetry dependency manager allows specifying optional dependencies via command:
$ poetry add --optional redis
Which results in this configuration:
[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = "^3.8"
redis = {version="^3.4.1", optional=true}
However how do you actually install them? Docs seem to hint to:
$ poetry install -E redis
but that just throws and error:
Installing dependencies from lock file
[ValueError]
Extra [redis] is not specified.
4
Answers
You need to add a
tool.poetry.extras
group to yourpyproject.toml
if you want to use the-E
flag during install, as described in this section of the docs:The key refers to the word that you use with
poetry install -E
, and the value is a list of packages that were marked as--optional
when they were added. There currently is no support for making optional packages part of a specific group during their addition, so you have to maintain this section in yourpyproject.toml
file by hand.The reason behind this additional layer of abstraction is that extra-installs usually refer to some optional functionality (in this case
caching
) that is enabled through the installation of one or more dependencies (in this case justredis
).poetry
simply mimicssetuptools
‘ definition of extra-installs here, which might explain why it’s so sparingly documented.I will add that not only you have to have this extras section added by hand, as well your optional dependencies cannot be in dev section.
Example of code that won’t work:
But this WILL work:
Up-voted Drachenfels’s answer.
Dev dependency could not be optional, otherwise, no matter how you tweak it with extras or retry with
poetry install -E
, it will just never get installed.This sounds like a bug but somehow by design,
— concluded in Poetry PR#606 comment by one maintainer. See here for detailed context: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/pull/606#issuecomment-437943927
I would say that I can accept the fact that optional dev-dependency cannot be implemented. However, at least Poetry should warn me when I have such a config. If so, I wouldn’t have been confused for a long time, reading each corner of the help manual and found nothing helpful.
I found some people did get trap in this problem (Is poetry ignoring extras or pyproject.toml is misconfigured?) but their questions are closed, marked duplicated and re-linked to this question. Thus I decided to answer here and give more details about this problem.
This is now possible (with Poetry version 1.2; perhaps even an earlier version), using the "extras" group:
It will appear in the section
which is also newer style (compared to
[tool.poetry.extras]
or[tool.poetry.extras.dependencies]
See the documentation. Interestingely, this still follows the older style,
[tool.poetry.extras]
, and doesn’t show the use ofpoetry add
, but the above result is what I get.