How to import requirements.txt into Poetry

First of all, congratulations on choosing Poetry for your Python project management. It’s a fantastic choice, and I hope that Poetry becomes the de facto standard.

It’s time to bid farewell to the good old, barebones requirements.txt file, to move your dependencies over to Poetry, and let it handle everything—including proper version tracking of dependencies.

I’m going to assume that you’ve already initialized your Poetry project and have the pyproject.yml file at the root of your project. If not, run the following command to initialize a Python project with Poetry:

poetry init

Now, migrating from requirements.txt to Poetry is as easy as running the following command at the root of your Python project:

poetry add $(cat requirements.txt)

And if you wish to add local dev dependencies, with your dependencies defined in requirements.dev.txt, then you need to run the following command:

poetry add --group dev $(cat requirements.dev.txt)

Next, open the pyproject.yml file at the root of your project, and you should see your core dependencies listed under [tool.poetry.dependencies] and dev dependencies under [tool.poetry.group.dev.dependencies]:

[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = "^3.11"
django = ">=4.2,<4.3"
wagtail = ">=5.1,<5.2"

[tool.poetry.group.dev.dependencies]
pytest = ">=7.4,<7.5"

At this point, you’re ready to say goodbye to requirements.txt files and fully embrace the power of Poetry:

rm requirements.txt
rm requirements.dev.txt

Ah, doesn’t that feel good?