Pants has some basic, non-language-specific functionality built in to its core. For example, you can count the lines of code under some directory in your repo:
$ ./pants count-loc 'src/**'
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Python 13 155 50 22 83 5
BASH 2 261 29 22 210 10
JSON 2 25 0 0 25 0
...
However most Pants functionality, including all language-specific functionality, is provided via backends.
A backend is a Python package that implements some required functionality, and uses hooks to register itself with Pants. You enable a backend by listing it under the backend_packages config key in pants.toml.
For example, to enable Python support:
[GLOBAL]
backend_packages = ["pants.backend.python"]
Updated 2 months ago