CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#python
Mike S
Mike S

Reputation: 166

referencing and importing third party python libraries

I am fairly new to python, and come from a C# background. In C# l, third party libraries are commonly stored inside the project folder.

This means that libraries are totally internal to the project. The project then is not dependent on anything outside of the project folder (other than .net framework of course).

I really like this structure and have tried successfully to mirror this in python by copying the libraries into a lib directory, in the project root, and adding the lib folder to the python path on startup of the application.

I am worried that there may be something I am overlooking by doing this as I have looked around a bit amd have not really seen anyone else in thw python community doing this.

My question is simply - is this ok? Is there something that I may miss by simply dumping the necessary .py libraries in, rather than using easy install, and thus storing the libraries in site packages, at a system level?

Please feel free to let me know of any drawbacks you can see, no matter how simple.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 211

Answers (2)

D.Shawley
D.Shawley

Reputation: 59583

I'll espouse the usage of virtualenv and pip for development purposes. This will give you exactly the sandbox that you are used to. As for distribution, use setup.py and reuse the requirements.txt file that you would use with pip install -r to install dependencies to generate the install_requires argument to setuptools.setup. I've been meaning to set up an example that shows this off a little - check out https://github.com/dave-shawley/setup-example for a nice example with some description too. I plan on adding a little more to this as time allows.

Upvotes: 1

karolx
karolx

Reputation: 508

If you want to closely manage the dependencies of your code on the per project basis you might want to take a look at virtualenv.

Virtualenv will allow you to keep your dependencies close to your source but will remove the error prone manual copying of the .py files.

On top of that remamber that some packages are not pure python and they sometimes contain compiled C code - if you use virtualenv you do not have to worry about it.

Upvotes: 0

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