Managing Idem projects with Poetry

Poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in Python. It is the recommended tool for managing your Idem cloud provider plugins for your Idem cloud infrastructure code.

There are several benefits to using Poetry for package management.

Clear package management

Because the packages you add using poetry add and their version requirements are recorded to pyproject.toml, you can see the exact plugins or packages you have explicitly installed and the version requirements you have set for them.

Environment reproducibility

When you add a plugin or package, Poetry records the exact package version and versions of any installed dependencies to poetry.lock, including hashes. Running poetry install –sync installs the exact set of packages recorded in poetry.lock and removes any other packages. This makes your environment reproducible across machines.

Integration with infrastructure configuration

Because you add poetry.lock and pyproject.toml to your SCM, the package versions used in your Python environment are tied to your infrastructure configuration files. When combined with a post-checkout hook, your environment can automatically update to the exact plugin configuration used at the time that infrastructure configuration was written.

Clear package upgrades

When you upgrade a package with pip, you can end up with incompatible packages installed simultaneously.

For example, imagine that you installed idem==20.0.0, then installed idem-aws==1.4.0, and then installed idem==23.0.0. After installation, you’ll see an error in the output, but the command will report a successful install. However, idem==23.0.0 and idem-aws==1.4.0 are incompatible.

With Poetry, if you attempt to install incompatible packages, it will fail before installing any packages.

Alternative package installs

You can directly install from git, so you don’t need to wait for a release to get a new feature you would otherwise be waiting for. The installed commit hash is recorded to poetry.lock, so subsequent poetry install –sync calls installs the same code.

For example, you can run poetry add git+https://git@gitlab.com:vmware/idem/idem-aws.git to install the latest idem-aws release.

Learn more

With Poetry, you can quickly install and update package versions. See Poetry commands for Idem for more information.