Pants is a distributed open source software build system designed to facilitate engineering best practices as well as add highly-granular intelligent caching in order to speed up test suite execution both locally and remotely.
In addition, Pants helps to make modern software development and deployment more resistant to errors by systematizing the entirety of the build process, preventing security vulnerabilities and emerging threats.
Toolchain, a sponsor of the project, earlier this month announced an upgrade to Pants in order to empower application development teams with an all encompassing approach to providing fast and consistent software builds. With this, Toolchain is seeking developers to provide feedback to the preview release version of Pants in order to shape the direction and capabilities of the solution.
With this update, key capabilities now available for Python, Shell, and Docker, and in preview release for Java, Scala, and Go include:
- Smart concurrency and catching by breaking up the build work into units, running them concurrently, and catching the result.
- Minimal configuration by analyzing the code in order to learn what it needs to know
- Extensibility by allowing teams to add custom build steps by writing idiomatic Python code using the Pants Plugin API
- A genuine open source software ethos with maintainers that answer questions, listen to feedback, welcome ideas, act on feature requests, and review code submissions sent by the community
- Enterprise support through Toolchain’s team of build experts
In order to start using Pants, visit here and follow the “Getting Started” guide. Free support from the open source community is available here, on the “pantsbuild” Slack workspace.
