border-patrol 0.1rc2

Logs all imported packages and their version

Border-Patrol

Border-Patrol logs all imported packages and their version to support you during debugging. In 95% of all cases when something suddenly breaks in production it is due to some different version in one of your requirements. Pinning down the versions of all your dependencies and dependencies of dependencies inside a virtual environments helps you to overcome this problem but is quite cumbersome and thus this method is not always applied in practice.

With Border-Patrol you can easily find the culprit by looking in the logs of the last working versions and compare it to the failing one since Border-Patrol will list all imported packages and their corresponding version right at the end of your program.

Usage

Border-Patrol is really simple to use, just install it with pip install border-patrol and import it before any other package, e.g.:

from border_patrol import with_print

import numpy as np
import scipy as sp
import sklearn

If you run those lines in a script, you will get the a similar output to this one:

Python version is 3.6.7 |Anaconda, Inc.| (default, Oct 23 2018, 14:01:38) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Clang 4.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_401/final)]
Following modules were imported:
PACKAGE         VERSION                         PATH                                                                                     
border_patrol   0.0.post0.dev1+g32fe77c.dirty   /Users/fwilhelm/Sources/border_patrol/src/border_patrol                                  
numpy           1.15.1                          /Users/fwilhelm/anaconda/envs/recsys_data/lib/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/__init__.py  
scipy           1.1.0                           /Users/fwilhelm/anaconda/envs/recsys_data/lib/python3.6/site-packages/scipy/__init__.py  
sklearn         0.19.2                          /Users/fwilhelm/anaconda/envs/recsys_data/lib/python3.6/site-packages/sklearn/__init__.py

If you import with_print, Border-Patrol will use print as output function. Since most production applications will rather use the logging module, you can tell Border-Patrol to use it by importing with_log_{error|warning|info|debug}. For instance from border_patrol import with_log_info will log the final report by using the INFO logging level.

If you want even more fine grained control you can import the BorderPatrol class directly from the border_patrol package and use the register() and unregister() method to activate and deactivate it, respectively.

How does it work?

Border-Patrol is actually quite simple. It overwrites the __import__ function in Python's builtins package to track every imported package. Additionally it registers an atexit handler to be called when your application finishes and reports all imported modules. To avoid any problem registering these things more than once, Border-Patrol is implemented as Singleton and thus it is not thread-safe.

Note

This project has been set up using PyScaffold 3.1. For details and usage information on PyScaffold see https://pyscaffold.org/.