Specify the version of Poetry itself in a version-controlled project?

[AndreLaranjeira]

Hello.

I'm fairly new to using Poetry and I was using it to manage dependencies and their versions for a Python software project that is version-controlled with Git/GitHub. However, the most recent major version of Poetry introduced a breaking change in the export command, which I previously used inside of a GitHub workflow to deploy the project. As such, my older version of Poetry can still run the command locally, but the latest version of Poetry used by the GitHub workflow cannot. I cannot modify the pyproject.toml to satisfy the latest version of Poetry as that creates an error for my local version of Poetry and I cannot update my local version of Poetry due to OS reasons.

To avoid this problem (and similar problems that might arise in the future), I wanted to know if there is a way to specify the version of Poetry to be used in my project repository by the GitHub workflow that installs Poetry. I know that the version of Python can be specified in a variety of ways (such as a .python-version file, which is what I currently use). Is there a similar way of doing this for Poetry so that all developers and GitHub workflows are on the same page as to what version of Poetry to use?

I understand that I can just hard-code the Poetry installation command on the GitHub workflow to install an older version of Poetry with pipx/pip, but I was wondering if there is a better way of storing this information.

[guillermodotn]

I suggest using a Makefile like the following:

POETRY_VERSION := 2.1.1  # Your poetry version

.PHONY: install
install:
	pip install poetry==$(POETRY_VERSION)

.PHONY: check
check:
	@which poetry > /dev/null 2>&1 && poetry --version | grep $(POETRY_VERSION) || echo "Poetry not installed or wrong version"

.PHONY: help
help:
	@echo "Makefile commands:"
	@echo "  make install   - Install Poetry version $(POETRY_VERSION)"
	@echo "  make check     - Check if Poetry is installed and matches $(POETRY_VERSION)"

[AndreLaranjeira]

Hello, @guillermodotn.

This is actually a very interesting idea. I never thought of using a Makefile for Python, only when working with C/C++. However, not all my collaborators are on Linux, so this might present a bit of a challenge for them, especially on Windows.

Also, I just wanted to confirm this: does Poetry have any standard way of version specification at the moment? Something that would be more portable than a makefile so that other tools in the Python ecosystem could interact with it (in the same way that .python-version is widely used and recognized)?

[guillermodotn]

I see the problem, but you can't pin Poetry's version within Poetry itself. A more Pythonic approach would be to use a straightforward requirements-poetry.txt file to pin Poetry's version.

Also, take a look at tools like tox or invoke, they might be helpful.

[AndreLaranjeira]

I see the problem, but you can't pin Poetry's version within Poetry itself. A more Pythonic approach would be to use a straightforward requirements-poetry.txt file to pin Poetry's version.

Also, take a look at tools like tox or invoke, they might be helpful.

Understood, thank you for your explanation, @guillermodotn!