Wheelhouse 0.1.0

A utility to help maintain a wheelhouse.

Wheelhouse is a utility to help maintain a wheelhouse.

What is a Wheelhouse?

A wheelhouse is a local cache of python packages in wheel format that gets committed with your code to your VCS. When installing packages during continuious integration and production, the wheels in the wheelhouse are used instead of depending on PyPI or some other network location.

Advantages:

• Wheels are stored in your DVCS bringing further clarity to exactly what packages are needed/expected and how they have changed over time.

• CI builds are faster and more consistent. Due to the increased speed of installing wheels from a local cache instead of pulling them from a network location, we can have tox start with a new virtualenv before every run, thereby insuring all depdencies have been specified and installed into the wheelhouse correctly.

• Production deployments are similiarily fast and consistent. Since the CI and production servers both pull from the same wheelhouse we have higher certainty that our production code is running against the exact same pacakges that have been tested.

• Since wheels are built on development or build machines, the need for development system packages to be installed on production servers is removed.

• Targeting forks, development versions, unpublished, and/or private software for production is much easier than setting up & maintaining a private PyPI server like devpi.

• Splits the package management process into two distinct steps:

  1. Build packages (from various locations, with specified version) and put wheels in the wheelhouse.

  2. Install the latest version of a package from the wheelhouse.

Disadvantages:

• Some may be opposed to storing binary packages in version control.

• More disk space is needed for the binary packages.

• The wheelhouse will accumlate packages if not cleaned up regularily. The purge command can help with this.

Current Features:

• build: Will build all packages for all requirements file specified in the config file and store in the wheelhouse directory. Can also be passed the names of individual packages or aliases.

• config: display the configuation wheelhouse is using.

• purge: purge the wheelhouse of any wheel that isn’t the most recent version in the wheelhouse for that package.

Possible Future Features:

• install: install a package/wheel from the wheelhouse.

• status: compare the working environment’s installed packages with the requirement files, the wheelhouse, and package indexes (PyPI) and show where they are out of sync.

Configuration

You must place a wheelhouse.ini in the base of your project. This is considered the “project root” and all relative file paths are calculated from this location.

You may also place a wheelhouse.ini file in a user-specific location to override defaults for Wheelhouse. See wheelhouse config for more information.

Config files are read by a SafeConfigParser instance. See the linked docs for interpolation support available.

An example configuration file follows:

[wheelhouse]
# These files are relative to the project's requirements directory (default: `requirements/`).
requirement_files =
    wheel-only.txt
    testing.txt

# Make sure each package has a wheel built for python 2 & 3.
pip_bins = pip, pip3.4

[aliases]
# Shortcuts to be used when specifying projects to `build`
keg = https://github.com/level12/keg/zipball/master
ke = https://github.com/level12/keg-elements/zipball/master

Issues & Discussion

Please direct questions, comments, bugs, feature requests, etc. to: https://github.com/level12/wheelhouse/issues

Current Status

Very Beta, expect changes.

Changelog

in development version

• added purge command