Using Poetry

Properties2

Type	Practice
Note created	Feb 17, 2025

This is a short cheat-sheet with some of the most common commands to be used when managing a Python project with Poetry

Warning

If you have just installed Poetry, there is a fair chance that now is the perfect moment to configure it to create the virtual environments in each project’s folder (in a subfolder called .venv/, which can be added to the .gitignore file.

poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

To create set up a new project you can use:

# If you want to create a new folder, from scratch
poetry new project-name
# If the project exists and you want to set up poetry
poetry init

Poetry defines all its settings in a pyproject.toml, a file that is not exclusive to Poetry but actually complies with PEP 518. In this file, all dependencies and module info is gathered. To add a new dependency:

# If it is a runtime dependency
poetry add pandas
# If it is a development dependency
poetry add -D black

To update the lockfile and install all dependencies, run:

poetry install