Is there anything in python or linux what basically instructs the system to "install whatever is necessary". Basically I find it annoying to install python packages for each new script/system/server that I work on. Each time I end up doing a sudo pip or an apt-get or dnf anyway. Why not automate that within the script itself. Whereever a 'no package found' error crops up, pass the library name to the install statement. Is this there ?
PS: I know docker exists, but am talking at a python/script level or a direct system level for purely execution purposes.
Thanks
The best way I know is, create a file requirements.txt
list out all the packages name in it and install it using pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
Example requirements.txt
:
BeautifulSoup==3.2.0
Django==1.3
Fabric==1.2.0
Jinja2==2.5.5
PyYAML==3.09
Pygments==1.4
SQLAlchemy==0.7.1
South==0.7.3
amqplib==0.6.1
anyjson==0.3
...
You can use setuptools to install dependencies automatically when you install your custom project on a new machine. Requirements file works just fine if all you want to do is to install a few PyPI
packages.
Here is a nice comparison between the two. From the same link you can see that if your project has two dependent packages A
and B
, all you have to include in your setp.py file is a line
install_requires=[
'A',
'B'
]
Of course, setuptools
can do much more. You can include setups for external libraries (say C files), non PyPI dependencies, etc. The documentation gives a detailed overview on installing dependencies. There is also a really good tutorial on getting started with python packaging.
From their example, a typical setup.py file would look like this.
from setuptools import setup
setup(name='funniest',
version='0.1',
description='The funniest joke in the world',
url='http://github.com/storborg/funniest',
author='Flying Circus',
author_email='flyingcircus@example.com',
license='MIT',
packages=['funniest'],
install_requires=[
'markdown',
],
zip_safe=False)
In conclusion, it is so simple to get started with setuptools
. This package can make it fairly easy to migrate your code to a new machine.