Question: I've recently migrated to poetry for my dependencies management so pardon if my question is out of the scope of poetry here. Final goal My final goal is to create a RPM package that contains a virtualenv with my software installed along with all its dependencies. This RPM would then provide my software in isolation with the system where it is installed. Reproduce the problem I'm facing a problem while using poetry install in my virtualenv. As soon as the source directory of my software is deleted, my CLI refuses to work any longer. Reproduce I've created a simple repository to reproduce the problem: https://github.com/riton/python-poetry-venv Here are the that I'm using with poetry: #!/bin/bash -ex VENV_DIR="/venv" SRC_DIR="/src" ALT_SRC_DIR="/src2" USER_CACHE_DIR="~/.cache" # Copy directory (cause we're mounting it read-only in the container) # and we want to remove the source directory later on cp -r $SRC_DIR $ALT_SRC_DIR # We'll remove this directory to test if the soft is still working # without the source dir cd $ALT_SRC_DIR [...] python3.8 -m venv "$VENV_DIR" source $VENV_DIR/bin/activate [...] poetry install --no-dev -v [...] # Our software will be called without an activated virtualenv # so 'deactivate' the current one deactivate cd / echo "Try after install" # Start the "CLI" after installation $VENV_DIR/bin/python-poetry-venv echo "Removing source directory and trying again" rm -rf $ALT_SRC_DIR $VENV_DIR/bin/python-poetry-venv echo "Removing user cache dir and trying again" rm -rf $USER_CACHE_DIR $VENV_DIR/bin/python-poetry-venv  The script above fails with the following error: [...] Try after install + /venv/bin/python-poetry-venv THIS IS THE MAIN + echo 'Removing source directory and trying again' Removing source directory and trying again + rm -rf /src2 + /venv/bin/python-poetry-venv Traceback (most recent call last): File "/venv/bin/python-poetry-venv", line 2, in <module> from python_poetry_venv.cli import main ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'python_poetry_venv' make: *** [Makefile:2: test-with-poetry-install] Error 1  link to the full script source As soon as the source directory is removed. The CLI refuses to work any longer. Trying with pip install I've tried to replace the poetry install with something like poetry build && pip install dist/*.whl (link to this script version) With the version using pip install of the .whl file, I'm successfully creating a standalone deployment of my application. This is suitable to RPM packaging and could be deployed anywhere. Software versions + python3.8 -V Python 3.8.13 + poetry --version Poetry version 1.1.13  Final thoughts I can't help but think that I'm misusing poetry here. So any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance Regards

Answer: I'm late to the party, but I want to suggest a way to accomplish this. While poetry is amazing at managing your project's main and dev dependencies and locking their versions, I wouldn't rely on it while deploying on your situation. Here's a way to solve it: # export your dependencies in the requirements.txt format using poetry poetry export --without-hashes -f requirements.txt -o requirements.txt # create your venv like you did on your example (you may want to upgrade pip/wheel/setuptools first) python3 -m venv venv && . venv/bin/activate # then install the dependencies pip install --no-cache-dir --no-deps -r requirements.txt # then you install your own project pip install .  There you have it, everything you need will be self-contained in the venv folder.