pex

This project is the home of the .pex file, and the pex tool which can create them. pex also provides a general purpose Python environment-virtualization solution similar to virtualenv. pex is short for “Python Executable”

in brief

To quickly get started building .pex files, go straight to Building .pex files. New to python packaging? Check out packaging.python.org.

intro & history

pex contains the Python packaging and distribution libraries originally available through the twitter commons but since split out into a separate project. The most notable components of pex are the .pex (Python EXecutable) format and the associated pex tool which provide a general purpose Python environment virtualization solution similar in spirit to virtualenv. PEX files have been used by Twitter to deploy Python applications to production since 2011.

To learn more about what the .pex format is and why it could be useful for you, see What are .pex files? For the impatient, there is also a (slightly outdated) lightning talk published by Twitter University: WTF is PEX?. To go straight to building pex files, see Building .pex files.

Guide:

• What are .pex files?
  • tl;dr
  • Why .pex files?
  • How do .pex files work?
• Building .pex files
• Invoking the pex utility
  • Specifying requirements
  • Specifying entry points
  • Saving .pex files
  • Tailoring requirement resolution
  • Tailoring PEX execution at build time
  • Tailoring PEX execution at runtime
• Using bdist_pex
  • bdist_pex
  • bdist_pex --bdist-all
• Using Pants
• PEX with included Python interpreter
  • Background
  • Lazy scies
  • BusyBox scies
• PEX Recipes and Notes
  • Uvicorn and other customizable application servers
  • Long running PEX applications and daemons
  • PEX app in a container
  • PEX-aware application
  • Gunicorn and PEX
  • PEX and Proxy settings
• PEX runtime environment variables