pip-safe 0.0.12

A CLI tool to safely install CLI programs from PyPi

pip-safe

pip-safe is the safe and easy pip package manager for command-line apps from PyPi.

Synopsys

pip-safe install lastversion
lastversion linux

Why

Using pip install ... outside virtualenv can simply break your system. So many tutorials out there blindly recommend that without any note of having to use virtualenvs, and so many people do just run that without any knowledge of what a virtualenv is.

If you run an OS which distributes Python packages via yum, apt, etc. you will break your system sooner or later, if you keep using pip as root or sudo.

You either have to package the Python-based program yourself, or have to use a virtualenv for installing it. Everything else is a risk of breakage.

pip-safe is here to make it very easy to install command-line apps from PyPi without having to package anything.

Installation

Pre-Requisites

Configure your PATH to execute stuff from ~/.local/bin and /usr/local/bin.

Place export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/bin in your ~/.bashrc then run source ~/.bashrc to apply to current shell.

CentOS/RHEL 7, 8 and Fedora Linux

sudo yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
sudo yum -y install pip-safe

Using pip-safe command installs a program using Python 3, by default.

If you require to run a legacy app using Python 2, run yum install pip2-safe to install Python 2 support. Then to install a Python 2 app, use pip2-safe install <app>. You can still use pip-safe as usual, for Python 3 apps.

Other systems

Please do not use these methods if packages for pip-safe are available!

Install pip-safe for current user

If you install pip-safe using this method, you can only install packages for current user, but this method does not require root.

Ensure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH, then:

mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs
python3 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe
~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip install pip-safe
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $HOME/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip-safe $HOME/.local/bin/pip-safe

System-wide installation of pip-safe

When pip-safe is installed system-wide, you can install both system-wide and user packages with it.

Ensure /usr/local/bin is in your PATH, then:

mkdir -p /opt/pip-safe
python3 -m venv /opt/pip-safe/pip-safe
/opt/pip-safe/pip-safe/bin/pip install pip-safe
ln -s /opt/pip-safe/pip-safe/bin/pip-safe /usr/local/bin/pip-safe

Usage

Safely install and remove PyPi (pip) programs without breaking your system

positional arguments:
  <command>        Command to run, e.g. install, update, remove or list
  package-name

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose
  -y, --assumeyes
  --system         Install for all users
  --version        show program's version number and exit

Installing a program

pip-safe install <name>

To see what's going on under the hood, pass --verbose flag.

There is limited support for installing directly from Git URLs, e.g.:

pip-safe install git+https://github.com/dvershinin/lastversion.git

Global installation

By default, programs are installed to ~/.local/bin/<package> (for current user). For a system-wide installation, use --system:

sudo pip-safe install --system lastversion  

This installs a package to /opt/pip-safe/<package> and symlinks its executable to /usr/local/bin, so it's still safe :-)

Removing a program

pip-safe remove <name>

Updating a program

pip-safe update <name>

Listing installed packages

pip-safe list    

With pip-safe, you can easily install command line programs from PyPi, while not worrying about breaking your system.

How

it installs each program into its own virtualenv, and symlinks whichever executables it has over to ~/.local/bin/

It is that easy and I don't know why nobody did this before.

Caveats

• Only pure Python apps will work absolutely reliably, because others might require system libraries, and we can't decipher what are those
• Tested only with Python 3.6

Helpful stuff used while creating pip-safe

• Invoking virtualenv from Python