Inline script metadata#

Warning

This specification has been provisionally accepted. It is subject to being changed or abandoned. See the PEP 723 conditional acceptance thread for details.

This specification defines a metadata format that can be embedded in single-file Python scripts to assist launchers, IDEs and other external tools which may need to interact with such scripts.

Specification#

This specification defines a metadata comment block format (loosely inspired by reStructuredText Directives).

Any Python script may have top-level comment blocks that MUST start with the line # /// TYPE where TYPE determines how to process the content. That is: a single #, followed by a single space, followed by three forward slashes, followed by a single space, followed by the type of metadata. Block MUST end with the line # ///. That is: a single #, followed by a single space, followed by three forward slashes. The TYPE MUST only consist of ASCII letters, numbers and hyphens.

Every line between these two lines (# /// TYPE and # ///) MUST be a comment starting with #. If there are characters after the # then the first character MUST be a space. The embedded content is formed by taking away the first two characters of each line if the second character is a space, otherwise just the first character (which means the line consists of only a single #).

Precedence for an ending line # /// is given when the next line is not a valid embedded content line as described above. For example, the following is a single fully valid block:

# /// some-toml
# embedded-csharp = """
# /// <summary>
# /// text
# ///
# /// </summary>
# public class MyClass { }
# """
# ///

A starting line MUST NOT be placed between another starting line and its ending line. In such cases tools MAY produce an error. Unclosed blocks MUST be ignored.

When there are multiple comment blocks of the same TYPE defined, tools MUST produce an error.

Tools reading embedded metadata MAY respect the standard Python encoding declaration. If they choose not to do so, they MUST process the file as UTF-8.

This is the canonical regular expression that MAY be used to parse the metadata:

(?m)^# /// (?P<type>[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$\s(?P<content>(^#(| .*)$\s)+)^# ///$

In circumstances where there is a discrepancy between the text specification and the regular expression, the text specification takes precedence.

Tools MUST NOT read from metadata blocks with types that have not been standardized by this PEP or future ones.

pyproject type#

The first type of metadata block is named pyproject which represents content similar to what one would see in a pyproject.toml file.

This document MAY include the [run] and [tool] tables.

The tool table MAY be used by any tool, script runner or otherwise, to configure behavior.

The [run] table MAY include the following optional fields:

  • dependencies: A list of strings that specifies the runtime dependencies of the script. Each entry MUST be a valid dependency specifier.

  • requires-python: A string that specifies the Python version(s) with which the script is compatible. The value of this field MUST be a valid version specifier.

Any future specifications that define additional fields for the [run] table when used in a pyproject.toml file MUST include the aforementioned fields exactly as specified. The fields defined by this specification are equally as applicable to full-fledged projects as they are to single-file scripts.

Script runners MUST error if the specified dependencies cannot be provided. Script runners SHOULD error if no version of Python that satisfies the specified requires-python can be provided.

Example#

The following is an example of a script with an embedded pyproject.toml:

# /// pyproject
# [run]
# requires-python = ">=3.11"
# dependencies = [
#   "requests<3",
#   "rich",
# ]
# ///

import requests
from rich.pretty import pprint

resp = requests.get("https://peps.python.org/api/peps.json")
data = resp.json()
pprint([(k, v["title"]) for k, v in data.items()][:10])

The following is an example of a proposed syntax for single-file Rust projects that embeds their equivalent of pyproject.toml, which is called Cargo.toml:

#!/usr/bin/env cargo

//! ```cargo
//! [dependencies]
//! regex = "1.8.0"
//! ```

fn main() {
    let re = Regex::new(r"^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$").unwrap();
    println!("Did our date match? {}", re.is_match("2014-01-01"));
}

Reference Implementation#

The following is an example of how to read the metadata on Python 3.11 or higher.

import re
import tomllib

REGEX = r'(?m)^# /// (?P<type>[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$\s(?P<content>(^#(| .*)$\s)+)^# ///$'

def read(script: str) -> dict | None:
    name = 'pyproject'
    matches = list(
        filter(lambda m: m.group('type') == name, re.finditer(REGEX, script))
    )
    if len(matches) > 1:
        raise ValueError(f'Multiple {name} blocks found')
    elif len(matches) == 1:
        content = ''.join(
            line[2:] if line.startswith('# ') else line[1:]
            for line in matches[0].group('content').splitlines(keepends=True)
        )
        return tomllib.loads(content)
    else:
        return None

Often tools will edit dependencies like package managers or dependency update automation in CI. The following is a crude example of modifying the content using the tomlkit library.

import re

import tomlkit

REGEX = r'(?m)^# /// (?P<type>[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$\s(?P<content>(^#(| .*)$\s)+)^# ///$'

def add(script: str, dependency: str) -> str:
    match = re.search(REGEX, script)
    content = ''.join(
        line[2:] if line.startswith('# ') else line[1:]
        for line in match.group('content').splitlines(keepends=True)
    )

    config = tomlkit.parse(content)
    config['project']['dependencies'].append(dependency)
    new_content = ''.join(
        f'# {line}' if line.strip() else f'#{line}'
        for line in tomlkit.dumps(config).splitlines(keepends=True)
    )

    start, end = match.span('content')
    return script[:start] + new_content + script[end:]

Note that this example used a library that preserves TOML formatting. This is not a requirement for editing by any means but rather is a “nice to have” feature.

The following is an example of how to read a stream of arbitrary metadata blocks.

import re
from typing import Iterator

REGEX = r'(?m)^# /// (?P<type>[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$\s(?P<content>(^#(| .*)$\s)+)^# ///$'

def stream(script: str) -> Iterator[tuple[str, str]]:
    for match in re.finditer(REGEX, script):
        yield match.group('type'), ''.join(
            line[2:] if line.startswith('# ') else line[1:]
            for line in match.group('content').splitlines(keepends=True)
        )

Recommendations#

Tools that support managing different versions of Python should attempt to use the highest available version of Python that is compatible with the script’s requires-python metadata, if defined.

History#

This specification was originally defined as PEP 723.