Thursday, January 20, 2011

easy_install tip - setting up own repository

One of the really cool features of easy_install is that you can install packages from thePython Cheese Shop, which is a web-based repository of Python packages. For example, in order to install IPython using easy_install and the Cheese Shop, you would simply type `easy_install ipython`. It’s all fine and dandy for open source projects to put their source code out there for the world to look at, but what if you work on (gasp) closed source code? Do you have to miss out on all this easy_install remote repository goodness? Not at all.

First, you have to setup a web server that will serve up your packages. I am using lighttpd on my laptop, which misses the point in practice since i could just as easily install the eggs locally rather than by pointing at http://localhost, but it works for example purposes. I have lighttp serving up a directory that contains a repository directory called “repo”. So,http://localhost/repo will give a directory listing of all the packages I can serve up.

Second, you need to build your packages and put them in a directory that your webserver can serve up, the “repo” directory in my case. I have 2 packages, foo v0.1 and bar v0.1, that I made into eggs. The filenames are bar-0.1-py2.5.egg and foo-0.1-py2.5.egg. In this example, foo has a dependency on bar. Since easy_install handles dependencies so well, I would expect an easy_install of foo to resolve the bar dependency and install them both. Step three will prove this assumption either correct or incorrect.

Third, and finally, you simply tell easy_install to look at your local repository for packages. Here is the command and output from installing from my local repository:

root@lanik:/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages# easy_install -f http://localhost/repo foo Searching for foo

Reading http://localhost/repo Best match: foo 0.1

Downloading http://localhost/repo/foo-0.1-py2.5.egg

Processing foo-0.1-py2.5.egg

Moving foo-0.1-py2.5.egg to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages

Adding foo 0.1 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/foo-0.1-py2.5.egg

Processing dependencies for foo Searching for bar==0.1 Best match: bar 0.1

Downloading http://localhost/repo/bar-0.1-py2.5.egg

Processing bar-0.1-py2.5.egg Moving bar-0.1-py2.5.egg to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages

Adding bar 0.1 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/bar-0.1-py2.5.egg

Finished processing dependencies for foo


The “-f” flag tells easy_install where else it can look for packages. That’s it!

Ref: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/11/easy_install_tip_setting_up_yo.html

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