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Manage Dependencies#

PDM provides a bunch of handful commands to help manage your project and dependencies. The following examples are run on Ubuntu 18.04, a few changes must be done if you are using Windows.

Initialize a project#

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mkdir pdm-test && cd pdm-test
pdm init

Answer several questions asked by PDM and a pyproject.toml will be created for you in the project root:

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[project]
name = "pdm-test"
version = "0.0.0"
description = ""
authors = [
    {name = "Frost Ming", email = "mianghong@gmail.com"}
]
license = {text = "MIT"}
requires-python = ">=3.7"

dependencies = []

If pyproject.toml is already present, it will be updated with the metadata. The metadata format follows the PEP 621 specification

For details of the meaning of each field in pyproject.toml, please refer to Project File.

Add dependencies#

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pdm add requests

pdm add can be followed by one or several dependencies, and the dependency specification is described in PEP 508.

PDM also allows extra dependency groups by providing -G/--group <name> option, and those dependencies will go to [project.optional-dependencies.<name>] table in the project file, respectively.

You can reference other optional groups in optional-dependencies, even before the package is uploaded:

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[project]
name = "foo"
version = "0.1.0"

[project.optional-dependencies]
socks = ["pysocks"]
jwt = ["pyjwt"]
all = ["foo[socks,jwt]"]

After that, dependencies and sub-dependencies will be resolved properly and installed for you, you can view pdm.lock to see the resolved result of all dependencies.

Local dependencies#

Local packages can be added with their paths. The path can be a file or a directory:

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pdm add ./sub-package
pdm add ./first-1.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

The paths MUST start with a ., otherwise it will be recognized as a normal named requirement.

VCS dependencies#

You can also install from a git repository url or other version control systems. The following are supported:

  • Git: git
  • Mercurial: hg
  • Subversion: svn
  • Bazaar: bzr

The URL should be like: {vcs}+{url}@{rev}

Examples:

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# Install pip repo on tag `22.0`
pdm add "git+https://github.com/pypa/pip.git@22.0"
# Provide credentials in the URL
pdm add "git+https://username:password@github.com/username/private-repo.git@master"
# Give a name to the dependency
pdm add "pip @ git+https://github.com/pypa/pip.git@22.0"
# Or use the #egg fragment
pdm add "git+https://github.com/pypa/pip.git@22.0#egg=pip"
# Install from a subdirectory
pdm add "git+https://github.com/owner/repo.git@master#egg=pkg&subdirectory=subpackage"

Add development only dependencies#

New in 1.5.0

PDM also supports defining groups of dependencies that are useful for development, e.g. some for testing and others for linting. We usually don't want these dependencies appear in the distribution's metadata so using optional-dependencies is probably not a good idea. We can define them as development dependencies:

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pdm add -dG test pytest

This will result in a pyproject.toml as following:

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[tool.pdm.dev-dependencies]
test = ["pytest"]

For backward-compatibility, if only -d or --dev is specified, dependencies will go to dev group under [tool.pdm.dev-dependencies] by default.

Note

The same group name MUST NOT appear in both [tool.pdm.dev-dependencies] and [project.optional-dependencies].

Editable dependencies#

Local directories and VCS dependencies can be installed in editable mode. If you are familiar with pip, it is just like pip install -e <package>. Editable packages are allowed only in development dependencies:

Note

Editable installs are only allowed in the dev dependency group. Other groups, including the default, will fail with a [PdmUsageError].

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# A relative path to the directory
pdm add -e ./sub-package --dev
# A file URL to a local directory
pdm add -e file:///path/to/sub-package --dev
# A VCS URL
pdm add -e git+https://github.com/pallets/click.git@main#egg=click --dev

Save version specifiers#

If the package is given without a version specifier like pdm add requests. PDM provides three different behaviors of what version specifier is saved for the dependency, which is given by --save-<strategy>(Assume 2.21.0 is the latest version that can be found for the dependency):

  • minimum: Save the minimum version specifier: >=2.21.0 (default).
  • compatible: Save the compatible version specifier: >=2.21.0,<3.0.0.
  • exact: Save the exact version specifier: ==2.21.0.
  • wildcard: Don't constrain version and leave the specifier to be wildcard: *.

Add prereleases#

One can give --pre/--prerelease option to pdm add so that prereleases are allowed to be pinned for the given packages.

Update existing dependencies#

To update all dependencies in the lock file:

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pdm update

To update the specified package(s):

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pdm update requests

To update multiple groups of dependencies:

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pdm update -G security -G http

To update a given package in the specified group:

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pdm update -G security cryptography

If the group is not given, PDM will search for the requirement in the default dependencies set and raises an error if none is found.

To update packages in development dependencies:

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# Update all default + dev-dependencies
pdm update -d
# Update a package in the specified group of dev-dependencies
pdm update -dG test pytest

About update strategy#

Similarly, PDM also provides 2 different behaviors of updating dependencies and sub-dependencies， which is given by --update-<strategy> option:

  • reuse: Keep all locked dependencies except for those given in the command line (default).
  • eager: Try to lock a newer version of the packages in command line and their recursive sub-dependencies and keep other dependencies as they are.
  • all: Update all dependencies and sub-dependencies.

Update packages to the versions that break the version specifiers#

One can give -u/--unconstrained to tell PDM to ignore the version specifiers in the pyproject.toml. This works similarly to the yarn upgrade -L/--latest command. Besides, pdm update also supports the --pre/--prerelease option.

Remove existing dependencies#

To remove existing dependencies from project file and the library directory:

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# Remove requests from the default dependencies
pdm remove requests
# Remove h11 from the 'web' group of optional-dependencies
pdm remove -G web h11
# Remove pytest-cov from the `test` group of dev-dependencies
pdm remove -dG test pytest-cov

Install the packages pinned in lock file#

There are a few similar commands to do this job with slight differences:

  • pdm sync installs packages from the lock file.
  • pdm update will update the lock file, then sync.
  • pdm install will check the project file for changes, update the lock file if needed, then sync.

sync also has a few options to manage installed packages:

  • --clean: will remove packages no longer in the lockfile
  • --only-keep: only selected packages (using options like -G or --prod) will be kept.

Specify the lockfile to use#

You can specify another lockfile than the default pdm lock by using the -L/--lockfile <filepath> option or the PDM_LOCKFILE environment variable.

Select a subset of dependencies with CLI options#

Say we have a project with following dependencies:

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[project]  # This is production dependencies
dependencies = ["requests"]

[project.optional-dependencies]  # This is optional dependencies
extra1 = ["flask"]
extra2 = ["django"]

[tool.pdm.dev-dependencies]  # This is dev dependencies
dev1 = ["pytest"]
dev2 = ["mkdocs"]
Command What it does Comments
pdm install install prod and dev deps (no optional)
pdm install -G extra1 install prod deps, dev deps, and "extra1" optional group
pdm install -G dev1 install prod deps and only "dev1" dev group
pdm install -G:all install prod deps, dev deps and "extra1", "extra2" optional groups
pdm install -G extra1 -G dev1 install prod deps, "extra1" optional group and only "dev1" dev group
pdm install --prod install prod only
pdm install --prod -G extra1 install prod deps and "extra1" optional
pdm install --prod -G dev1 Fail, --prod can't be given with dev dependencies Leave the --prod option

All development dependencies are included as long as --prod is not passed and -G doesn't specify any dev groups.

Besides, if you don't want the root project to be installed, add --no-self option, and --no-editable can be used when you want all packages to be installed in non-editable versions. With --no-editable turn on, you can safely archive the whole __pypackages__ and copy it to the target environment for deployment.

Show what packages are installed#

Similar to pip list, you can list all packages installed in the packages directory:

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pdm list

Or show a dependency graph by:

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$ pdm list --graph
tempenv 0.0.0
└── click 7.0 [ required: <7.0.0,>=6.7 ]
black 19.10b0
├── appdirs 1.4.3 [ required: Any ]
├── attrs 19.3.0 [ required: >=18.1.0 ]
├── click 7.0 [ required: >=6.5 ]
├── pathspec 0.7.0 [ required: <1,>=0.6 ]
├── regex 2020.2.20 [ required: Any ]
├── toml 0.10.0 [ required: >=0.9.4 ]
└── typed-ast 1.4.1 [ required: >=1.4.0 ]
bump2version 1.0.0

Set PyPI index URL#

You can specify a PyPI mirror URL by following commands:

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pdm config pypi.url https://test.pypi.org/simple

Allow prerelease versions to be installed#

Include the following setting in pyproject.toml to enable:

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[tool.pdm]
allow_prereleases = true

Set acceptable format for locking or installing#

If you want to control the format(binary/sdist) of the packages, you can set the env vars PDM_NO_BINARY and PDM_ONLY_BINARY.

Each env var is a comma-separated list of package name. You can set it to :all: to apply to all packages. For example:

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# No binary for werkzeug will be locked nor used for installation
PDM_NO_BINARY=werkzeug pdm add flask
# Only binaries will be locked in the lock file
PDM_ONLY_BINARY=:all: pdm lock
# No binaries will be used for installation
PDM_NO_BINARY=:all: pdm install

Solve the locking failure#

If PDM is not able to find a resolution to satisfy the requirements, it will raise an error. For example,

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pdm django==3.1.4 "asgiref<3"
...
🔒 Lock failed
Unable to find a resolution for asgiref because of the following conflicts:
  asgiref<3 (from project)
  asgiref<4,>=3.2.10 (from <Candidate django 3.1.4 from https://pypi.org/simple/django/>)
To fix this, you could loosen the dependency version constraints in pyproject.toml. If that is not possible, you could also override the resolved version in `[tool.pdm.resolution.overrides]` table.

You can either change to a lower version of django or remove the upper bound of asgiref. But if it is not eligible for your project, you can tell PDM to forcedly resolve asgiref to a specific version by adding the following lines to pyproject.toml:

New in version 1.12.0

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[tool.pdm.resolution.overrides]
asgiref = "3.2.10"  # exact version
urllib3 = ">=1.26.2"  # version range
pytz = "https://mypypi.org/packages/pytz-2020.9-py3-none-any.whl"  # absolute URL

Each entry of that table is a package name with the wanted version. In this example, PDM will resolve the above packages into the given versions no matter whether there is any other resolution available.

Note

By using [tool.pdm.resolution.overrides] setting, you are at your own risk of any incompatibilities from that resolution. It can only be used if there is no valid resolution for your requirements and you know the specific version works. Most of the time, you can just add any transient constraints to the dependencies array.