Examples

Let’s say we want to user Super Zippy on itself to create a single file containing all of Super Zippy’s dependencies and code.

$ superzippy superzippy superzippy.packaging:run
$ ./superzippy
Usage: superzippy [options] [PACKAGE1 PACKAGE2 ...] [ENTRY POINT]

superzippy: error: 1 or more arguments must be supplied.

We can send this single file (called superzippy above) to anyone and as long as they already have Python installed they can just run the file.

How it Works

It installs the Python package you specify into a virtualenv using pip (so anything you can tell pip to install can be given to superzippy), then grabs the site-packages directory out of the virtual environment and sticks it into a zip file along with some super bootstrapping code. Then it just makes the zip file executable by adding a proper shebang to it and flipping its executable bit.

Motivation

I created this for a tool called the Galah API Client which is a simple tool that has only pure Python dependencies. It is basically a script but since it is a little complex I didn’t want everything to be in a single file as that gets tedious fast… But I still wanted a good way to distribute it to my users who are not Python developers, may not have root access, and don’t want to deal with virtualenv and pip.

Installing

To install Super Zippy, just run

$ pip install superzippy

You can also install from the setup.py script yourself of course, or you can even create a super zipped up version of Super Zippy using Super Zippy. pip is probably the easiest way to go though if you’re already familiar with Python packages.

Are you using this tool?

If you’re using this tool on your project, let me know and I’ll link to you here. I’d also like to hear your feedback.

Authors

John Sullivan

License

Apache License v2.0 (see LICENSE)