missing the 'build_editable' hook

[sam-s]

pip3 install --user -e . fails after I switched form a trivial setup.cfg to an equally trivial pyproject.toml:

  Checking if build backend supports build_editable ... done
ERROR: Project file:///home/sds/src/pyapp has a 'pyproject.toml' and its build backend is missing the 'build_editable' hook. Since it does not have a 'setup.py' nor a 'setup.cfg', it cannot be installed in editable mode. Consider using a build backend that supports PEP 660.

despite PEP 660 being supported by setuptools since v64 and

$ pip3 install --user --upgrade setuptools
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (59.6.0)
Collecting setuptools
  Using cached setuptools-68.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (805 kB)
Installing collected packages: setuptools
Successfully installed setuptools-68.1.2

and

$ python3 -c 'import setuptools; print(setuptools.__version__)'
68.1.2

[webknjaz]

PEP 517 installs own setuptools into a throwaway tmp venv. Whatever you have in yours is never used, except for when PEP 517 isn't invoked at all.

[abravalheri]

Yeap, @webknjaz is right. Please make sure pip is updated, and that pyapp is not capping the version of setuptools specified in pyproject.toml.

If the problem still persists after you update pip and verify pyapp does not cap setuptools version, you can still try installing both setuptools and wheel and then running pip install --no-build-isolation .... There might be a chance there is a leak on the build environment isolation provided by pip (depending on the patches your OS might apply to Python/pip).

[sam-s]

amazingly enough,

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Requirement already satisfied: pip in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (22.0.2)
Collecting pip
  Downloading pip-23.2.1-py3-none-any.whl (2.1 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 2.1/2.1 MB 19.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00

Installing collected packages: pip
Successfully installed pip-23.2.1

solved the problem
Thank you!

[abravalheri]

Yeah, that is what I suspected. Probably related to pypa/pip#11430.

[sam-s]

verify pyapp does not cap setuptools version

what does this mean?
pyproject.toml has

[build-system]
requires = [
    "setuptools",
...

I do not specify any version numbers anywhere

[abravalheri]

Yeap, that is what I meant, to look into pyproject.toml and check if there was no cap there.

[sam-s]

what is cap?

[abravalheri]

Sorry that is probably a bit of slang. It would mean a upper bound for the version.

This article also uses the cap slang, so I thought it was popular among devs: https://iscinumpy.dev/post/bound-version-constraints/