Should Poetry online deployment use source code or tar.gz/whl packages?

[zengzuo613]

When running poetry build, tar.gz/whl packages are generated. For deploying an application to a container environment, is it preferable to use these types of packages or to deploy using the source code? Which is the most appropriate choice?

If using a tar.gz package, the CI/CD process can be as follows:

1. Package and compile:

poetry build

2. Copy the project package to the image in the Dockerfile:

ADD dist/app.tar.gz /app

3. Install dependencies and start the application:

cd /app
poetry install && poetry run start-{env}

[morvayo]

a wheel is a good deployment artifact if the application is packaged as an installable python project

build and test the wheel in ci then copy it into the image and install it with python -m pip install followed by the wheel path
run its installed console entry point or python module directly
poetry itself is not needed in the runtime image for that approach

one detail to watch is that a wheel does not embed poetry.lock
pip normally resolves dependencies from the wheel metadata so use a separately locked dependency install if you need the exact versions tested in ci

copying source and running poetry install is also valid when the application relies on the source layout
using a source archive still requires an installation step and may require build tools

the build command creates both distributions