Hi, I've just recently scratched a long standing itch I had: The need to "freeze" an EGG distribution, along with all of its requirements, into a single .py file that can be reinstalled at any time, even with *no* net access.
eggfreezer can be executed with a list of requirements and it will use easy_install to satisfy them and then create a single .py file (which bundles a tarball with all needed eggs) that when executed will bootstrap a virtualenv and install them in there, again, with no need for net access. I think this can be very useful for frameworks which rely heavily in eggs, like those I'm cross-posting to their lists, because the lack of something like this is perceived by many as a weakness of our install process and of setuptools in general. In fact, the main motivation for writing this was a discussion I had recently in python-es :) It doesn't attempt to replace the current way of installing with easy_install, but to provide a complementary wayfor those who have it hard to install eggs from PyPI (or any index) due to sub-optimal network access. It can be also very useful, at least it will be for me, for webapps or whatever that might need to be re-deployed in the future when the required versions of the dependencies might be old and hard to find again (it has happened to me several times, probably all of us, and it sucks). The usage is pretty straightforward: eggfreezer -o AllTurbogears2 -f http://turbogears.org/2.0/downloads/current TurboGears2 tg.devtools That command will try to satisfy all dependencies for TurboGears2 and tg.devtools (fetching them from local packages if available), using that url to find links, and bundle them into a file called AllTurboGears2-${py_version}-${platform}.py. When we execute that file we get: $ python AllTurboGears2-py2.5-linux-i686.py You must provide a DEST_DIR Usage: AllTG2-py2.5-linux-i686.py [OPTIONS] DEST_DIR Options: --version show program's version number and exit -h, --help show this help message and exit -v, --verbose Increase verbosity -q, --quiet Decrease verbosity --clear Clear out the non-root install and start from scratch --no-site-packages Don't give access to the global site-packages dir to the virtual environment --unzip-setuptools Unzip Setuptools when installing it Which should be familiar to anyone who has ever used virtualenv to create a bootstrap script. If we pass the DEST_DIR it asks for as a parameter it will create a virtualenv there and install all requirements we specified when creating installer from an inline, compressed, tarball. Without the need for net access. You can check out the results (and give TG2 a try now that you're at it ;) with this sample I've created: http://toscat.net/~alberto/AllTurboGears2-py2.5-linux-i686.py Unfortunately these are platform dependent at the moment. If anyone has any idea of how the script could be improved to bundle several platforms' binary eggs to create an "universal" installer please let me know! Ah, EggFreezer itself is at PyPI. "easy_install EggFreezer" will get it for you. It's MIT licensed. I've tested it on linux i686 with python 2.4 and python2.5. I have no idea if it works on other platforms, if it does, please let me know, if it doesn't, please send me a fix :) I've also created installers for TG1, TG2, Pylons, Rum and ToscaWidgets as means of testing and it worked like a charm :) Finally, I'd like to thank Ian for virtualenv, which is the real weight-lifter here, and of course Philip and all of those who've created setuptools. Alberto _______________________________________________ Repoze-dev mailing list Repoze-dev@lists.repoze.org http://lists.repoze.org/listinfo/repoze-dev
