Is working on branches with differing requirements possible?

• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.
• I have searched the documentation and believe that my question is not covered.

Question

I’m in the process of testing poetry for my python work. The one stumbling block I’ve hit is how to approach working on a different branch that has different requirements. (For example, working on a bug fix for the current version while still developing a new feature using different version of some dependencies.)

My workflow for this, is to clone a separate copy of the repo in a different directory for the bug fix. (Tests can take hours to run.) However, poetry appears to only allocate one virtualenv for the project, based on the name field of pyproject.toml.

How can I get poetry to maintain different virtualenvs for the same project?

[cauebs]

Ok, to tackle this today, you could remove the virtual environment and let poetry recreate it after you checkout to another branch. The problem, of course, is that you’d have to reinstall everything, which may take some time even if everything’s cached.

In the future we can add a setting like settings.virtualenvs.per-branch, which would default to false. That would require some work, but it might be justifiable if it’s a commonly wanted feature and if the alternatives are not very good. I’ll leave this decision to @sdispater.

If we get a greenlight, I can give this a go in a few days, after my finals.

[famura]

Even though this issue has been solved more than four years ago, I would like to point to poetry’s --remove-untracked option. A possible workflow is:

git checkout branch_you_want_to_work_on poetry shell poetry update poetry install --remove-untracked

This way your venv only contains the packages specified in the poetry.lock file of the branch you switched to.