Example of Bazel with pex and pip

This repo is a working example showing how to use Bazel with pex and pip.

This repo is meant to be educational. Therefore, please read the code.

The example shows:

• pulls dependencies using pip
• builds a single binary with pex
• reads a resource file

Usage

1. bazel build main.pex
2. ./bazel-bin/main.pex

The output:

Current file's path: /usr/local/google/home/tanin/.pex/code/e7c476458b50c0339f6e515b84111b4dd9dee723/test.py
appdirs' path: /usr/local/google/home/tanin/.pex/install/appdirs-1.4.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl.88ca3acdb0294d36138be8eb8d73eb234d0cc1d3/appdirs-1.4.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl/appdirs.pyc
Test.json's content: TEST
Finished.

Notice that appdirs comes from within .pex.

Design Decision

Why do we choose pex over subpar?

Subpar doesn't support extracting resource files from the archive. If we have a more complex use case (e.g. executing a bash script), we can't use subpar.

Pex, on another hand, can set zip_safe=False which extracts the archive before executing the python code.

Special Thanks

• The snippet on pip integration from @trivigy
• The pex integration from @benley