Usage without poetry#
Poe the Poet was originally intended as the missing task runner for poetry. But it works just as well with any other kind of virtualenv, or simply as a general purpose way to define handy tasks for use within a certain directory structure! This behaviour is configurable via the tool.poe.executor global option.
By default poe will run tasks in the poetry managed virtual environment, if the pyproject.toml contains a tool.poetry section. If it doesn’t then poe looks for a virtualenv to use at ./.venv or ./venv relative to the pyproject.toml.
If no virtualenv is found then poe will run tasks without any special environment management.
Usage without pyproject.toml#
When using Poe the Poet outside of a poetry (or other PEP 518) project, you can avoid the potential confusion of creating a pyproject.toml file and instead name the file poe_tasks.toml.
Usage with with json or yaml instead of toml#
As an alternative to toml, poethepoet configuration can also be provided via yaml or json files. When searching for a tasks file to load within a certain directory poe will try the following file names in order:
pyproject.toml
poe_tasks.toml
poe_tasks.yaml
poe_tasks.json
If pyproject.toml exists but does not contain the key prefix tool.poe then the search continues with poe_tasks.toml. If one of the listed poe_tasks.* files exist then the search is terminated, even if the file is empty.
When config is loaded from a file other than pyproject.toml the tool.poe namespace for poe config is optional. So for example the following two poe_tasks.yaml files are equivalent and both valid:
env:
VAR0: FOO
tasks:
show-vars:
cmd: "echo $VAR0 $VAR1 $VAR2"
env:
VAR1: BAR
args:
- name: VAR2
options: ["--var"]
default: BAZ
tool:
poe:
env:
VAR0: FOO
tasks:
show-vars:
cmd: "echo $VAR0 $VAR1 $VAR2"
env:
VAR1: BAR
args:
- name: VAR2
options: ["--var"]
default: BAZ