Hey everyone, is there an option for a minimal meltano installation? Currently, it seems meltano installs many pip modules for UI and out of the box supported taps-targets. Most of this is redundant for my use case. I want to use meltano as a thin wrapper over singer, effectively managing both my tap and target in the same yaml, and let meltano handle the virtualenvs for them.

There isn't currently a way to do this, no. Right now I'd suggest just installing Meltano in its own venv and ignoring the fact that it brings in some UI-related stuff you don't need. Please file an issue if you have ideas about how we could offer such a minimal version while keeping the full installation for most users 🙂

Exactly what @Reuben (Matatika) and I were discussing this afternoon. In the context of the docker image size. Option 1, start with a dependency list and trim it down. or 2, how about publishing a meltano-cli pip which brings just the minimal dependencies. In option 2 the user would need to add plugins for everything including the UI?

I like having a separate

meltano-cli

PyPI package and Docker image that can be much lighter. Can you create an issue for that? https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/2459 is also releated, in which we're considering a

meltano-core

package/module to be used from other Python code.

@douwe_maan I created an issue for the compact / rapid install https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/2711 and linked to the other dependency issue you mentioned.