Last Updated on March 7, 2026
Pants is a scalable build system for monorepos: codebases containing multiple projects, often using multiple programming languages and frameworks, in a single unified code repository.
Pants installs, orchestrates and runs dozens of standard underlying tools – compilers, code generators, dependency resolvers, test runners, linters, formatters, packagers, REPLs and more – composing them into a single stable, hermetic toolchain, and speeding up your workflows via caching and concurrency.
Pants is designed to be easy to adopt, use, and extend. It doesn’t require you to refactor your codebase or to create and maintain massive amounts of build metadata. You invoke it directly on source files and directories, so it doesn’t require users to adopt a new conceptual model.
It’s currently focused on Python, Go, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Shell, and Docker, with support for other languages and frameworks coming soon.
This is free and open source software
Key Features
- Explicit dependency modeling using static analysis instead of handwritten metadata.
- Fine-grained invalidation.
- Shared result caching.
- Concurrent and remote execution.
- Unified interface for multiple tools and languages.
- Extensibility and customizability via a plugin API that uses idiomatic async Python 3, in case you need any customizations.
- Code introspection features.
- Requires very minimal BUILD file metadata/boilerplate. It uses a combination of static analysis and sensible defaults to infer most of that information on the fly.
Website: www.haskell.org/cabal
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Pants contributors
License: Apache License 2.0
The core of Pants is its execution engine, which sequences and coordinates all the underlying work. The engine is written in Rust, for performance.
Pants is written in Python and Rust. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials
Related Software
| Build Systems | |
|---|---|
| Cargo | Rust package manager |
| gulp | Toolkit to automate & enhance your workflow |
| Bazel | Build and test your multi-language, multi-platform projects |
| Apache Maven | Build automation tool used primarily for Java projects |
| Gradle | Build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language |
| Meson | Next-generation build system |
| CMake | Family of tools designed to build, test and package software |
| Buck2 | Encourages the creation of small, reusable modules |
| Leiningen | Automating Clojure projects |
| Grunt | JavaScript Task Runner |
| Ninja | Small build system with a focus on speed |
| xmake | Cross-platform build utility based on Lua |
| SCons | Software construction tool |
| Pants | Scalable build system for monorepos |
| PHing | Build system based on Apache Ant |
| Rake | make-like build utility for Ruby |
| Apache Ant | Tool for automating software build processes |
| Cabal | Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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