CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Eduardo
Eduardo

Reputation: 220

How to "include" third party modules into my python script to make it portable?

I've developed a little script that searches through a wallpaper database online and download the wallpapers, I want to give this script to another person that isn't exactly good with computers and I'm kinda starting with python so I don't know how to include the "imports" of the third party modules in my program so it can be 100% portable, Is there something that can help me do this? or I will have to enter and analyse my third party modules and copy&paste the functions that I use?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3647

Answers (2)

jdotjdot
jdotjdot

Reputation: 17052

Worse thing to do

An easy thing you can do is simply bundle the other modules in with your code. That does not mean that you should copy/paste the functions from the other modules into your code--you should definitely not do that, since you don't know what dependencies you'll be missing. Your directory structure might look like:

/myproject
    mycode.py
    thirdpartymodule1.py
    thirdpartymodule2.py
    thirdpartymodule3/
        <contents>

Better thing to do

The real best way to do this is include a list of dependencies (usually called requirements.txt) in your Python package that Python's package installer, pip, could use to automatically download. Since that might be a little too complicated, you could give your friend these instructions, assuming Mac or Linux:

  1. Run $ curl http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py | python. This provides you with tools you'll need to install the package manager.
  2. Run $ curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python. This installs the package manager.
  3. Give your friend a list of the names of the third-party Python modules you used in your code. For purposes of this example, we'll say you used requests, twisted, and boto.
  4. Your friend should run from command line $ pip install <list of package names>. In our example, that would look like $ pip install requests twisted boto.
  5. Run the Python code! The lines like import boto should then work, since your friend will have the packages installed on their computer.

Upvotes: 4

Burhan Khalid
Burhan Khalid

Reputation: 174624

The easi(er) way:

  1. Start with a clean virtual environment.
  2. Install packages that you need to develop your code.
  3. Once you are done, create a list of requirements for your project.
  4. Send this file (from step 3) to your friend.

Your friend simply does pip install -r thefile.txt to get all the requirements for your application.

Here's an example:

D:\>virtualenv --no-site-packages myproject
The --no-site-packages flag is deprecated; it is now the default behavior.
New python executable in myproject\Scripts\python.exe
Installing setuptools................done.
Installing pip...................done.

D:\>myproject\Scripts\activate.bat
(myproject) D:\>pip install requests
Downloading/unpacking requests
  Downloading requests-0.14.1.tar.gz (523Kb): 523Kb downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package requests

    warning: no files found matching 'tests\*.'
Installing collected packages: requests
  Running setup.py install for requests

    warning: no files found matching 'tests\*.'
Successfully installed requests
Cleaning up...

(myproject) D:\>pip freeze > requirements.txt
(myproject) D:\>type requirements.txt
requests==0.14.1

Upvotes: 2

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