Task

Two python applications have conflicting dependencies and should be installed in a way that:

• the locked dependencies are used per application
• a global command is available for running each application

Solution

Each application is installed by poetry install. This makes sure:

• locked dependencies are used
• each application is isolated in its own virtual environment

Each application must provide a scripts entrypoint as described in https://python-poetry.org/docs/pyproject/#scripts

During poetry install this script entrypoint is placed into the bin folder of the virtual environment.

In general there are multiple ways to run these entrypoints.

• activate the venv (poetry shell or source /path/to/venv/bin/activate) and call the entrypoint
• use poetry run app1
• call the generated script in the bin folder by full path e.g. /path/to/venv/bin/app1

The last way shows us an opportunity for the second requirement of the task: making the command global available

By adding the full path to the PATH environment variable, we extend the search path for an executable.

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/app1/venv/bin:/path/to/app2/venv/bin

(Replace /path/to/app1/venv/bin and /path/to/app2/venv/bin with the correct pathes)

Now we can call app1 or app2 from everywhere.