PDM is meant to be a next generation Python package management tool.
It was originally built for personal use. If you feel you are going well
with Pipenv
or Poetry
and don't want to introduce another package manager,
just stick to it. But if you are missing something that is not present in those tools,
you can probably find some goodness in pdm
.
- Simple and fast dependency resolver, mainly for large binary distributions.
- A PEP 517 build backend.
- PEP 621 project metadata.
- Flexible and powerful plug-in system.
- Versatile user scripts.
- Opt-in centralized installation cache like pnpm.
Pipenv is a dependency manager that combines pip
and venv
, as the name implies.
It can install packages from a non-standard Pipfile.lock
or Pipfile
.
However, Pipenv does not handle any packages related to packaging your code,
so it’s useful only for developing non-installable applications (Django sites, for example).
If you’re a library developer, you need setuptools
anyway.
Poetry manages environments and dependencies in a similar way to Pipenv,
but it can also build .whl files with your code, and it can upload wheels and source distributions to PyPI.
It has a pretty user interface and users can customize it via a plugin. Poetry uses the pyproject.toml
standard,
but it does not follow the standard specifying how metadata should be represented in a pyproject.toml file (PEP 621),
instead using a custom [tool.poetry]
table. This is partly because Poetry came out before PEP 621.
Hatch can also manage environments (it allows multiple environments per project, but it does not allow to put them in the project directory), and it can manage packages (but without lockfile support). Hatch can also be used to package a project (with PEP 621-compliant pyproject.toml files) and upload it to PyPI.
PDM can manage virtual environments (venvs) in both project and centralized locations, similar to Pipenv. It reads project metadata from a standardized pyproject.toml
file and supports lockfiles. Users can add additional functionality through plugins, which can be shared by uploading them as distributions.
Unlike Poetry and Hatch, PDM is not limited to a specific build backend; users have the freedom to choose any build backend they prefer.
PDM requires python version 3.7 or higher.
Like Pip, PDM provides an installation script that will install PDM into an isolated environment.
For Linux/Mac
curl -sSL https://pdm.fming.dev/dev/install-pdm.py | python3 -
For Windows
(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://pdm.fming.dev/dev/install-pdm.py -UseBasicParsing).Content | python -
For security reasons, you should verify the checksum of install-pdm.py
.
It can be downloaded from install-pdm.py.sha256.
The installer will install PDM into the user site and the location depends on the system:
$HOME/.local/bin
for Unix%APPDATA%\Python\Scripts
on Windows
You can pass additional options to the script to control how PDM is installed:
usage: install-pdm.py [-h] [-v VERSION] [--prerelease] [--remove] [-p PATH] [-d DEP]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v VERSION, --version VERSION | envvar: PDM_VERSION
Specify the version to be installed, or HEAD to install from the main branch
--prerelease | envvar: PDM_PRERELEASE Allow prereleases to be installed
--remove | envvar: PDM_REMOVE Remove the PDM installation
-p PATH, --path PATH | envvar: PDM_HOME Specify the location to install PDM
-d DEP, --dep DEP | envvar: PDM_DEPS Specify additional dependencies, can be given multiple times
You can either pass the options after the script or set the env var value.
If you are on macOS and using homebrew
, install it by:
brew install pdm
If you are on Windows and using Scoop, install it by:
scoop bucket add frostming https://github.com/frostming/scoop-frostming.git
scoop install pdm
Otherwise, it is recommended to install pdm
in an isolated environment with pipx
:
pipx install pdm
Or you can install it under a user site:
pip install --user pdm
With asdf-vm
asdf plugin add pdm
asdf install pdm latest
Initialize a new PDM project
pdm init
Answer the questions following the guide, and a PDM project with a pyproject.toml
file will be ready to use.
Install dependencies
pdm add requests flask
You can add multiple dependencies in the same command. After a while, check the pdm.lock
file to see what is locked for each package.
Tell people you are using PDM in your project by including the markdown code in README.md:
[![pdm-managed](https://img.shields.io/badge/pdm-managed-blueviolet)](https://pdm.fming.dev)
Awesome PDM is a curated list of awesome PDM plugins and resources.
This project is strongly inspired by pyflow and poetry.
This project is open sourced under MIT license, see the LICENSE file for more details.