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Python package install using pip or easy_install from repos

Asked 2009-06-23T17:07:30.417
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The simplest way to deal with python package installations, so far, to me, has been to check out the source from the source control system and then add a symbolic link in the python dist-packages folder.

Clearly since source control provides the complete control to downgrade, upgrade to any branch, tag, it works very well.

Is there a way using one of the Package installers (easy_install or pip or other), one can achieve the same.

easy_install obtains the tar.gz and install them using the setup.py install which installs in the dist-packages folder in python2.6. Is there a way to configure it, or pip to use the source version control system (SVN/GIT/Hg/Bzr) instead.

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Using pip this is quite easy. For instance:

pip install -e hg+http://bitbucket.org/andrewgodwin/south/#egg=South

Pip will automatically clone the source repo and run "setup.py develop" for you to install it into your environment (which hopefully is a virtualenv). Git, Subversion, Bazaar and Mercurial are all supported.

You can also then run "pip freeze" and it will output a list of your currently-installed packages with their exact versions (including, for develop-installs, the exact revision from the VCS). You can put this straight into a requirements file and later run

pip install -r requirements.txt

to install that same set of packages at the exact same versions.

answered 2009-10-26T16:08:10.317

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