Aliases configuration file

[Peder2911]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The current way of providing aliases via the --alias flag does not provide any reliable way to share or replicate aliases between team members.

Describe the solution you'd like
My current workaround is to maintain the aliases in a file inside of the repo (.aliases). It would be good if the tool supported this natively.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I feel like it would be a good idea if the poly CLI either could accept a file containing newline-separated aliases directly, or if it had a configuration setting in a TOML file somewhere where one could set the aliases. I would like to hear your opinion on whether this configuration should happen in a separate file (i.e $USER/.poly.toml or $(pwd)/poly.toml) or whether it should be located in the development project pyproject file.

Hope you like my idea! I could implement this and PR, i would just need to hear your preference between the above alternatives.
P

[Peder2911]

To give you some context, I am currently using this file (.aliases)

pyyaml=yaml
opentelemetry-instrumentation=opentelemetry
opentelemetry-instrumentation-fastapi=opentelemetry
opentelemetry-instrumentation-aiohttp-client=opentelemetry
opentelemetry-distro[otlp]=opentelemetry
opentelemetry-instrumentation=opentelemetry
pydantic-settings=pydantic_settings
azure-identity=azure
pydantic[email]=pydantic

and this command when running check:

rye run poly check --alias $(cat .aliases | tr '\n' ','| sed 's/,$//') --strict

[DavidVujic]

I like your ideas @Peder2911!

I think it would make a lot of sense to have that in a TOML file, in a similar way as when configuring other tools (such as mypy).

Some of the aliases in your list I would expect the tool to figure out without it, I will have a look at this.

Edit: probably because of the --strict option.

[DavidVujic]

Meanwhile, would it be an option to use the Rye [tool.rye.scripts] section to define custom scripts, that also would be versioned?

[Peder2911]

Oh cool, I wasn't aware of rye scripts. That's a good solution!
I was thinking about whether the configuration for Polylith should be a part of the pyproject.toml at the root, or whether it should live in its own file. Mypy of course has a pretty excellent config resolution that looks in multiple places, that would be nice tool.

[svartalf]

I have a similar problem with the Google Cloud libraries specifically, though there are more examples out there in the PyPI.

When we add a couple of the Google libraries to the dependencies list,

dependencies = [
    "google-cloud-storage",
    "google-cloud-bigquery",
]

we will need to use them like this, according to their examples and docs:

from google.cloud import storage
from google.cloud import bigquery

bigquery_client = bigquery.Client()
storage_client = storage.Client()

In the current Polylith state, it would cause an issue with the poly check or poly libs commands, as they'll fail with this error:

$ poly check
🤔 Cannot locate google in my_project

Introspecting the dependencies metadata with the importlib.metadata to see what packages are providing this namespace might also be an option here, e.g.:

>>> from importlib.metadata import packages_distributions
>>> packages_distributions()["google"]
['google-api-core', 'protobuf', 'google-cloud-bigquery-storage', 'google-resumable-media', 'google-cloud-storage', 'google-auth', 'google-cloud-core', 'google-cloud-bigquery', 'googleapis-common-protos']

The downside of this approach is that I can use the google-cloud-storage client in my source code, but add the google-cloud-bigquery dependency, which will make this check happy, but also incorrect.

[DavidVujic]

Maybe using the rye feature is a good-enough solution, what do you think?

(I haven't tried this out properly, though)

[tool.rye.scripts]
check = { cmd = [
      "poly",
      "check",
      "--alias", "pyyaml=yaml,opentelemetry-instrumentation=opentelemetry, opentelemetry-instrumentation-fastapi=opentelemetry, opentelemetry-instrumentation-aiohttp-client=opentelemetry, opentelemetry-distro[otlp]=opentelemetry, opentelemetry-instrumentation=opentelemetry, pydantic-settings=pydantic_settings, azure-identity=azure, pydantic[email]=pydantic",
      "--strict"]}

[DavidVujic]

Great input @svartalf! I will try this out using the Google packages and try to find a solution.

[DavidVujic]

@svartalf I just tried with the google libraries and the check command shouldn't notify about the missing google library, if it is added in the project. However, I also found that it will report a false-positive when using bigquery but when only installed storage. This is a problem that I will investigate further, currently the tool takes some shortcuts to figure out the libraries part.

[DavidVujic]

@Peder2911 If you run the check command without the --strict option, I think you will have less need to specify aliases. The tradeoff is that the check command will report on false-positives for libraries like opentelemetry and google, that uses the same top namespace for several different installable packages.

Otherwise, I would suggest to use the Rye script (see suggestion).

[DavidVujic]

Oh cool, I wasn't aware of rye scripts. That's a good solution! I was thinking about whether the configuration for Polylith should be a part of the pyproject.toml at the root, or whether it should live in its own file. Mypy of course has a pretty excellent config resolution that looks in multiple places, that would be nice tool.

Oh, sorry. I must have missed this one. If you want to add something within Polylith, I think that the pyproject.toml at the root might be a good option! I also think that the already existing rye scripts option could be a candidate for solving this issue.

I'm not happy with how the check command is working as of today though, with the need to add the aliases for libraries like opentelemetry. I will spend some time to figure out a possible better solution (the one today takes some shortcuts to locate dependencies).

[DavidVujic]

@svartalf Will using the --alias option for poly check and poly libs solve it for you?

I am guessing that you use the --strict option already? So that means the tool expect an almost extact naming match. To solve it for libraries like the ones provide by google you can use --alias.

Example

# check
rye run poly check --alias google-cloud-storage=google google-cloud-bigquery=google --strict

#libs
rye run poly libs --alias google-cloud-storage=google google-cloud-bigquery=google --strict

Running the commands without the --strict option you won't be needing the alias option either. That will result in possible false-positive as you described, reporting "ok" for a google-cloud-* that is not added in the project.

[DavidVujic]

(moving this to the 💡 discussions section)