I can't use my own .whl package in Databricks app with databricks asset bundles

[Oumeima]

I am building a databricks app using databricks asset bundles. I need to use a helpers packages that i built as an artifact and using in other resources outside the app. The only way to use it is to have the built package inside the app source code folder and reference it in my requirements.txt file.

But the issue is it has to be tracked in my github repo and i want to avoid that.

Any idea on how to do it ? I'd appreciate the help!

Thank you!

[stbjelcevic]

Hi @Oumeima ,

One potential way around this is to upload the wheel file into a Unity Catalog volume or workspace file.

For the volume route, reference it directly in your app’s requirements.txt using an absolute /Volumes/<catalog>/<schema>/<volume>/...whl path. This is a supported and secure pattern for Databricks Apps dependency installation and avoids tracking the wheel in your app repo (source).

The workspace file route is very similar to the volume route. Specify the full path, e.g. /Workspace/Shared/Libraries/my-wheel-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl in your databricks.yml file (source).

Those are probably the 2 easiest routes to achieve what you are trying to do. Please note that you will need to make sure the wheel file is updated if you make changes to the source code, since it will live outside of CI/CD.

Let me know if neither of the above works for you and I can try to come up with another solution.