Change Pex cache dir from ~/.pex to another location

[Ashish Vidyarthi]

Hello Folks,

I see that when I use pex to create a executable, it creates a cache directory in user home (~/.pex).

pex -r sphinx -e sphinx:main -o sphinx.pex

I would like to isolate this per project. Is there an environmental variable that can be used to affect the location where the pex cache directory is created?

Regards,
Ashish

[John Sirois]

Yes - `PEX_ROOT`.  See here:

  https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex/blob/master/pex/pex_info.py#L27

  https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex/blob/master/pex/pex_info.py#L189

And - for example:

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ rm -rf pants.pex ~/.pex

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ PEX_ROOT=/tmp/pex_root ./pants

...

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ ls ~/.pex

ls: cannot access /home/jsirois/.pex: No such file or directory

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ ls /tmp/pex_root/

install

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ ls -1 /tmp/pex_root/install | head

ansicolors-1.0.2-py2-none-any.whl.4452225625be802319a1e1ca440bf01b18621b6f

antlr_python_runtime-3.1.3-py2-none-any.whl.5339272f968cce224cceea611988dcf4b1bfeeac

argparse-1.2.1-py2-none-any.whl.f1be776ab1f64c6f7d964c931ed4e39f6d57460e

cov_core-1.14.0-py2-none-any.whl.35f108534cfb7d13414b745a3ffbcd22b2cca19c

coverage-3.7.1-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg.03796ae00d9c388b3aef80a0dfa8887564a46cb9

coverage-3.7.1-py2.6-macosx-10.4-x86_64.egg.7c995f1e974b1c58be32ccc9703d70724a33894a

lockfile-0.9.1-py2-none-any.whl.b8138aa273924bb02232730efa0ce4838bde143f

Markdown-2.1.1-py2-none-any.whl.9cf8ebb68d6f65cc752e7c94fccd13a291eb4ab7

pex-0.7.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl.1528dd6e325a4178651c50d45cba558709e6df75

psutil-1.1.3-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg.7e211e03eee41bea90d3daf3c78e46e16e2df252

But beware - the root will revert to default if you run the pex w/o PEX_ROOT:

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ ./pants.pex

...

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pants (master) $ ls ~/.pex

install

[Andy Reitz]

Should we add PEX_ROOT to this doc?

http://pantsbuild.github.io/python-readme.html#manipulating-pex-behavior-with-environment-variables

If so, I'll file an issue.

-Andy.

[John Sirois]

I think it would be better to add a pointer over to pantsbuild/pex [1][2], there are alot of env vars and it seems like a losing battle to try document them in pants land at all:

jsirois@gill ~/dev/3rdparty/pex (master) $ find pex/ -name "*.py" | xargs grep PEX_ | sed -r -e "s|.*\b(PEX_[-_A-Z]+)\b.*|\1|" | sort -u

PEX_ALWAYS_CACHE

PEX_COVERAGE

PEX_FORCE_LOCAL

PEX_INHERIT_PATH

PEX_INTERPRETER

PEX_MODULE

pex/pex.py:      for key in filter(lambda key: key.startswith('PEX_'), os.environ):

PEX_PROFILE

PEX_PROFILE_ENTRIES

PEX_PROFILE_SORT

PEX_ROOT

PEX_TEARDOWN_VERBOSE

PEX_VERBOSE

[1] http://pex.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

[2] https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex

[Larry Hosken]

Filed an issue against pex project: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex/issues/13

[Andy Reitz]

Thanks Larry.

-Andy.