fix: build frontend and copilot on installation from source code (fork, git, local folder)

[asvishnyakov]

Fixes #2467
Caused by #2415

[asvishnyakov]

@francisjervis @andrePankraz You can use this branch until it gets merged.

@hayescode @sandangel I’d like to create another PR before merging this one, so I can test the publish workflow by running it manually with a test PyPi key. Until then, I’ll leave this as a draft. Also:

uv run --no-project feels like black magic to me, but it was needed because otherwise lint-backend fails as pnpm isn’t installed here. Instead of adding it (and increasing the overall build time), I used --no-install-project --no-editable, which prevents default project installation in editable mode by uv and, therefore, the automatic build of the frontend and copilot. Keep this in mind if you add or change workflows.

[francisjervis]

@asvishnyakov thanks for looking at this.

EDIT 2: this does work. @asvishnyakov's helpful comment below should probably be added to the docs for a clear end-to-end explanation of how to use a forked version in a python project.

[asvishnyakov]

@francisjervis The issue seems to occur when you add Chainlit from source code, whether it’s a fork, the Chainlit repo, or a local folder. No CI is involved here - the only relevant changes are the ones related to the build hook in build.py and pyproject.toml. I believe pip won’t update and rebuild dependency from your repo unless you specify --force-reinstall or remove and then re-add the dependency. You might want to try it in a new empty project first to confirm it works.

[asvishnyakov]

@francisjervis Does it fixed issue for you?

[francisjervis]

@francisjervis Does it fixed issue for you?

@asvishnyakov thanks, it turned out to be a sneaky (IDE settings vs terminal) wrong venv issue lol