vnm - Virtual eNvironment Manager

A half-assed Python virtual environment package manager.

This tool simplifies management and installation of packages in self-contained venv virtual environments. Think of it like composer, yarn, or similar, but for Python 3.

With this tool, developers don't have to use venv and pip directly to configure their environment for a self-contained program, and the tool uses a simple YAML configuration file.

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Installation

Prerequisites:

• Python >= 3.6
  • pip (usually bundled with Python)
  • venv (usually bundled with Python)
  • setuptools (usually bundled with Python)
  • wheel - This may be included with pip or on some distros of Linux.
• git
• sudo (Linux only)

Note: In the below examples, replace python3 and pip3 with the Python you plan to use. For example, if you're on Windows, you might use just python and pip, and don't need sudo.

Simple

Linux

# This may be needed on (K|X)Ubuntu:
sudo python3 install --force-reinstall wheel
# Install venom with pip
sudo pip3 install vnm

Windows

pip3 install vnm

Messy

# This may be needed on (K|X)Ubuntu:
sudo python3 install --force-reinstall wheel
# Clone from gitlab
git clone https://gitlab.com/N3X15/vnm.git vnm
# Change Directory: vnm
cd vnm
# Install to OS
sudo python setup.py install

Usage

# Set up an empty venv environment and an empty vnm.yml
vnm init
# Activate venv environment (changes shell variables and stuff)
vnm activate
# Add and install packages toml, requests, and pyyaml (version greater than or equal to 5.2)
# (same general spec syntax as pip)
vnm add toml requests "pyyaml>=5.2"
# Install all packages, as defined in vnm.yml
vnm install
# Upgrade all packages to newest version, restricting to the constraints in vnm.yml.
vnm upgrade

Example YAML

version: 4
options:
  # generates setup.cfg using /package-info
  generate-setup: true
  # generates requirements.txt and requirements.dev.txt
  generate-requirements: true
package-info:
  metadata:
    name: ChanManBot
    version: 2021.4.1
    license: MIT
    author: Rob "N3X15" Nelson
    author-email: nexisentertainment@gmail.com
    description: API- and screen-scraping archival bot, for use with chans. Used together with ChanManWeb.
    long-description: 'file: README.md' # Pulls from README.md
    long-description-content-type: text/markdown
  options:
    packages: 'find:' # Equivalent to setuptools.find_packages()
    entry-points:
      console-scripts:
      - vnm = vnm.__main__:main
packages:
  beautifulsoup4: {}
  cfscrape: {}
  chardet: {}
  Jinja2: {}
  lxml: {}
  mysqlclient: {}
  Pillow: {}
  psutil: {}
  pygit2: {}
  pyparsing: {}
  pyswagger: {}
  python-json-logger: {}
  pyyaml: {}
  pyzmq: {}
  requests: {}
  sqlalchemy: {}
  toml: {}
  tqdm: {}
  Twisted: {}
  deluge-client:
    repo:
      type: git
      uri: https://github.com/JohnDoee/deluge-client.git
      branch: develop
dev-packages:
  pybuildtools: {}

Naming and History

The name of this tool was originally going to be called hyss, but it turns out that there's a game by that name on Steam. Then I briefly tried snek, but that was in use by another project on pypi.

The current name is unlikely to be copyrighted, and is short and succinct, and according to Google, has no uses outside of unrelated academic articles.

vnm was originally designed to make management of chanman-bot dependencies easier, but it ended up being useful in other projects, as well.

Caveats

• vnm is still in development. You are welcome to use it, but it may have issues.
• vnm currently doesn't support any VCS systems other than git, for the simple reason that I haven't needed them. Please file a bug if you need another VCS, like svn or mercurial.
• When activating the environment (vnm activate), a child shell is launched, since a child process (vnm) cannot affect the parent process (the shell launching vnm), but that child can affect its children. Currently, the launched shell is /bin/bash on Linux and cmd.exe on Windows. A mechanism for changing the shell is in the works. Support for wrappers, like mosh, is unlikely.