how to install project to virtual environment pre-existing at path?

[itcarroll]

The path option to the [tool.hatch.envs.dev] table, with type = "virtual", accepts an "explicit path to the virtual environment." Maybe I am pushing the interpretation to think that allows me to point to a pre-existing virtual environment, although hatch does not complain. However, when I do this, the project does not get installed in the environment. I only get the project's dependencies. Can I use the path argument this way AND also have the project installed?

Use case: the environment will include a package for which I turn on "PIP_NO_BINARY", and if I create and activate the environment in advance of running hatch -e dev shell I can include that package's build dependencies.

[ofek]

The project should be installed, try explicitly disabling skip-install.

[itcarroll]

Adding skip-install = false to [tool.hatch.envs.dev] does not help. Also noticing that if I remove and create the environment (with python -m venv envs/dev, not hatch), then hatch -e dev shell won't sync dependencies either. I can force it by deleting the relevant ".metadata" folder, but that still doesn't get the project installed.

[sciros]

I'm running into the same issue when trying to have PyCharm and Hatch "coexist" by sharing the same venv (PyCharm creates a venv folder, I can point Hatch to it via tool.hatch.envs.default.path="venv".) However, indeed this does not work for me as I'd like. At no point does Hatch sync dependencies or attempt to install them in the first place. It's aware of them, which I can see if I run hatch dep show requirements but they never get synced. It seems like things only work if Hatch and PyCharm don't share virtual environments. Not ideal, and perhaps both tools are missing something here, but certainly there's no intuition that Hatch would not behave as specified if it's pointed to an existing directory for the environment.

Edit: it does work if I change a dependency in my pyproject.toml which appears to be a way to trigger a re-sync. But Hatch doesn't really do a sanity check and re-sync otherwise. A force resync command would be very appreciated for this kind of scenario, where I am basically recreating my project in an IDE.