Developing with Poetry and Tips/Tricks

[FrankD412]

With our recent transition from purely virtual environments to poetry for contributing, I wanted to start a discussion as a centralized place for asking about poetry setup, configuration, tips and tricks.

If you're on a Mac or Linux -- I recommend installing poetry through brew. It's as simple as brew install poetry. You do lose the ability to update through the command line itself, but if you're already using brew it's just convenient. See their other install methods here.

If you're already using virtualenvs (and maybe virtualenvwrapper), I recommend setting the environment variables for poetry to create its hashed virtual environments in the same place as your designated WORKON_HOME. Here's how it looks in my .zshrc file:

# Virtualenv settings
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3
export POETRY_VIRTUALENVS_PATH=$WORKON_HOME

Further -- if you have oh-my-zsh enabled, you can enable its plugin using (for other autocomplete plugins see their docs):

# Oh-My-Zsh
mkdir $ZSH/plugins/poetry
poetry completions zsh > $ZSH/plugins/poetry/_poetry

With that you should now be able to not only create and use your poetry create virtual environments with poetry itself, but now you can activate them with virtualenvwrapper.

I'm still relatively new to poetry myself, but if you have tips and tricks for using poetry feel free to share here!