Django/Python apps and prerequisites for developer environment

Question

Currently my Django project has a huge readme doc, that any developer, whishing to work on the source, must follow to setup their development environment.

It goes something like this:

Prerequisites:

Django Css. See Django CSS.

CleverCSS. See Clever CSS.

Beautiful Soup. See Beautiful Soup.

Dateutil. See python-dateutil.

httplib2 http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/

python-oauth2 https://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2

python-twitter http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/

Is there any facility for writting some sort of script that will fetch the dependencies automatically? At least to automate this process partially to something like:

python setup_environment.py

I've looked at setuptools - but it seems to me that it is more for the purpose of installing the app itself onto the system, not fulfilling the developer's requirements for environment setup.

No offense, but that is a pipe dream, I have done the above in linux using simple bash scripts basically either leveraging wget/snv/git to get the source and then calling the boilerplate build (./configure && make && make install) or (python build && sudo python build install) , but its not platform independent. — Nix
– Nix, Commented Jun 29, 2011 at 17:35
Have you looked into pip? Specifically, virtualenv, pip, and "pip freeze"? — Elf Sternberg
– Elf Sternberg, Commented Jun 29, 2011 at 17:42

Timmy O'Mahony · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-29 17:43:47Z

6

Will pip not do the job?

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html#

You can freeze all requirements on your server to a file (run this on the server):

pip freeze > REQUIREMENTS.txt

and then on your dev environment:

pip install -r ./REQUIREMENTS.txt

to install everything listed in the REQUIREMENTS file.

You should also look at installing virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) as well on your development (and production) server

http://iamzed.com/2009/05/07/a-primer-on-virtualenv/

They allow you to set up multiple encapsulated python environments. This means you can have two django apps set up on the same machine, each with different python versions/python applications/django versions.

answered Jun 29, 2011 at 17:43

Timmy O'Mahony

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John Mee · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-30 00:21:36Z

0

You also require specific versions of each of these - the ones you built and tested your application against.

But they're all just python modules - ie uncompiled text files. You can put them all with your source such that when they get your code they get all these exact dependencies at the same time. Set pythonpath and you're done.

Works just so long as the package is pure python. Any C libs lurking in there and you're probably back to pip/setuptools/apt/easy - "lxml" i'm talking about you.

edited Jun 30, 2011 at 0:21

answered Jun 30, 2011 at 0:16

John Mee

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