Setting up Poetry

• If you are just hacking scripts, pip + venv is fine.
• But if you're writing a real project, you will need to use Poetry.

Here is why:

• Just like venv, it creates a virtual environment automatically per project.
• It handles dependency resolution more intelligently.
• Uses pyproject.toml for project metadata and dependencies:

[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = "^3.11"
requests = "^2.31.0"
flask = "^2.3.0"

• Generates a poetry.lock file to pin exact versions.
• Can also build and publish packages (in case you want to release your own libraries).

• Pros: more reproductible environments.
• Cons: slower than pip, extra tool to install.

To use it, you will first need to get pipx, which will allow Python scripts to be used as if they were standalone command line tools. Then you can install Poetry with:

pipx install poetry

Workflow:

poetry init         # create pyproject.toml
poetry add flask    # add dependency
poetry install      # install dependencies
poetry run python   # run inside venv

Install some dev tools:

poetry add --dev black isort ruff mypy pytest