How to use poetry for recursive installation?

Question

I'm trying to install this repository using poetry package manager. Here's how it's done using pip:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/parlance/ctcdecode.git
cd ctcdecode && pip install .

But if I try to run

poetry add ctcdecode

It fails with big traceback (over 200 lines I think). So I installed it with

poetry run git clone --recursive https://github.com/parlance/ctcdecode.git
poetry run pip install ./ctcdecode

But this way is not suitable for sharing with other devs. Can I do it with pyproject.toml somehow?

Answer 1

poetry add <packagename> adds and installs a dependency available on pypi (or if configured other package repositories) to you project.

If you want to add a package, where the source code is located in a git repository use poetry add git+<url_of_git>.

The problem with ctcdecode in both ways is, that it needs to be build. For this torch is needed. ctcdecode doesn't declare this build dependency in a pyproject.toml according to PEP 518.

You can work around it, by clone the git repository and put a pyproject.toml with this content into the project's folder:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools", "torch"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

Then go back to your current project and add the local path dependency like this:

$ poetry add <relative_path_to_ctcdecode>