pants

What is the purpose of the BUILD.tools file in a pants repo?


When installing pants into a new repo, it seems you need to copy BUILD.tools from the pants distribution into the root directory of the repo.

  1. What is this file used for?
  2. Do I need to edit this file?
  3. Do I need to update this file when I upgrade the version of pants?

Solution

    1. This file is used for tools that Pants itself uses. For example, it includes jmake, which Pants uses to build Java files and coberatura, which Pants uses for text coverage reporting.

    2. You might want to edit this file if you want to use a different version of one of these tools (you'll also sometimes need to edit your pants.ini to reflect the new version).

    3. Sometimes Pants itself will add a new tool, or update a version. In this case, when you upgrade pants you'll want to update your BUILD.tools file as well.