Local project installs

regular

editable

This is functionally the same as setuptools’ develop mode, and that’s precisely the mechanism used for setuptools-based projects. (Note)

There are two advantages over using setup.py develop directly:

This works with non-setuptools build-backends as well.

The “.egg-info” directory is created relative to the project path, when using pip. This is generally a better location than setuptools, which dumps it in the current working directory.

Build artifacts

Certain build backends (eg: setuptools) will litter the project directory with secondary build artifacts (eg: .egg-info directories).