The nice thing about my approach is that pip-tools is only needed when modifying your requirements, and it also lives in a separate venv/requirements.txt from t

The nice thing about my approach is that pip-tools is only needed when modifying your requirements, and it also lives in a separate venv/requirements.txt from the dependencies you actually care about. So yes: you need those dependencies in a development context, if you're actively modifying your Python requirements. But they don't make their way into your production requirements.txt, and don't need to be installed anywhere other than a short-lived venv.