#11440 (comment) is the currently agreed upon user-facing design for this feature.

What's the problem this feature will solve?

In #8049, we identified an use case for installing just the dependencies from pyproject.toml.

As described in the solution section below --only-deps=<spec> would determine all dependencies of <spec> excluding that package itself and install those without installing the package. It could be used to

1. allow specifying environment variables that are active only while building a package of interest (without having it be active while potentially building its dependencies).
2. separate dependency installation from building and installing a package, allowing to rebuild a package in a docker build while the dependency installation step is loaded from cache.

This example shows both use cases:

# copy project metadata and install (only) dependencies
COPY pyproject.toml /myproj/
WORKDIR /myproj/
RUN pip install --extra-index-url="$PIP_INDEX" --only-deps=.[floob]

# copy project source files, build in a controlled environment and install our package
COPY src/mypkg/ /myproj/src/mypkg/
RUN env SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION=2.0.2 python3 -m build --no-isolation --wheel
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --no-dependencies dist/*.whl

Instead of the solution from #8049, @pradyunsg prefers a solution similar to the one below: #8049 (comment)

Describe the solution you'd like

One of those two, or similar:

1. (used in the example above)

   --only-deps would work like -r in that it’s not a flag globally modifying pip’s behavior but a CLI option with one argument that can be specified multiple times. Unlike -r it accepts a dependency spec and not a path to a file containing dependency specs.

   Where pip install <spec> first installs all dependencies and then (build and) install the package referred to by the spec itself, pip install --only-deps=<spec> would only install the dependencies.

2. --only-deps would work like --[no|only]-binary, in that it requires an argument specifying what package not to install. A placeholder like :requested: could be used, e.g.:

   pip install --only-deps=:requested: .[floob]

Alternative Solutions

• Re-using -r instead of adding --only-deps.

  I don’t think this is a good idea, since people would be tempted to do -r pyproject.toml which would be wrong (Dependency specs including file paths look like like ./path/to/pkg[extra1,extra2])

• Making --only-deps a global switch modifying pip’s behavior like e.g. --pre.

  I have found that global switches like that are dangerous and not very intuitive. To install a dev version of your package, doing pip install --pre mypkg seems innocuous but will actually install dev versions of mypkg and all its dependencies that have any dev versions. It’s safer to do something like pip install mypkg>=0.1.post0.dev0 to limit dev version installations to one package. Similarly it’s unclear what a --only-deps switch would apply to. Would pip install -r reqs.txt --only-deps install the dependencies of every package specified in the file but none of those packages?

• Using e.g. beni to convert PEP 621 dependencies to a requirements.txt.

  This works even today but feels like is shouldn’t be necessary as it involves quite a few steps, including writing a file to disk.

Additional context

NA

Code of Conduct

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