pip-safe 0.0.1

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 Python apps.

pip-safe install lastversion
lastversion kernel

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 virtualenv is.

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

You either package required Python-base software yourself, or use virtualenv for each non-packaged Python software you intend to use. Everything else is a risk of breakage.

pip-safe is here to make it very easy to install stuff from PyPi without having to package it.

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 (pending)

sudo yum install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-el$(rpm -E %{rhel})-latest.rpm
sudo yum install pip-safe

Other systems

mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs

Ensure virtualenv-3 is installed, then:

virtualenv-3 ~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe
~/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip install pip-safe
ln -s $HOME/.virtualenvs/pip-safe/bin/pip-safe $HOME/.local/bin/pip-safe

Usage

Installing a program

pip-safe install <name>

Removing a program

pip-safe remove <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.

Helpful stuff used while creating pip-safe

• Invoking virtualenv from Python