Make it easier to load wheels from the local file system

[georgevreilly-stripe]

🚀 feature request

Relevant Rules

Possibly in whl_library, but more likely in requirements.txt

Description

I had created a patched wheel that I wished to test with Bazel and rules_python before publishing it to our internal Artifactory package index. There was no easy way to accomplish this.

I eventually worked out that I could test my patched wheel by using pip2pi to create a local package index on my filesystem, then adding --index-url=/tmp/pypi/simple to the beginning of my requirements.txt.

See this writeup for full details.

Describe the solution you'd like

If you have a solution in mind, please describe it.

I think the easiest thing for users is if they can specify a file path in requirements.txt; e.g.,

sympy==1.12
./tmp/torch-2.1.0+stripe.5-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.whl
triton==2.1.0

Pip allows this, after all.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Have you considered any alternative solutions or workarounds?

[github-actions]

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