Sorry Python but it is what it is.
Would that just create a list of the current packages/versions without actually locking anything?
Would that just create a list of the current packages/versions
Yes, and all downstream dependencies
without actually locking anything?
What do you mean? Nothing stops someone from manually installing an npm package that differs from package-lock.json - this behaves the same. If you pip install -r requirements.txt
it installs the exact versions specified by the package maintainer, just like npm install
the only difference is python requires you to specify the “lock file” instead of implicitly reading one from the CWD
As I understand, when you update npm packages, if a package/version is specified in package-lock.json
, it will not get updated past that version. But running those pip commands you mentioned is only going to affect what version gets installed initially. From what I can tell, nothing about those commands is stopping pip from eventually updating a package past what you had specified in the requirements.txt
that you installed from.
How is it not a lock file?
package.json doesn’t contain the exact version number of all downstream dependencies, this does
Lockfile contains exact state of the npm-managed code, making it reproducible exactly the same every time.
For example without lockfile in your package.json you can have version 5.2.x. In your working directory, you use 5.2.1, however on repo, 5.2.2 has appeared, matching your criteria. Now let’s say a new bug appeared in 5.2.2.
Now you have mismatched vendor code, that can make your code behave differently on your machine, and your coworker’s machine, making you hunt for bug that wasn’t even on your side.
Lockfile prevents that by saving an actual state of vendor code.