How can I install PySide on Travis?

Question

My tests for Quamash depend on PySide (or PyQt eventually) for Python 3.4, so I'm wondering how I can install this dependency on Travis so that it's available to the tests?

I am aware that I can install PySide from source via pip, but that is a very slow process.

Let me know if I need to provide more info.

Answer 1

Installing via apt-get is currently not possible. See github issue and travis docs.

Three other options.

Just use pip

Your .travis.yml will include:

install:
  - pip install PySide

As you mentioned, it will take a LONG time to build PySide from source on the travis-ci servers. However, this method is guaranteed to work.

Wait for Travis CI to update to Ubuntu 14.04

Issue. Python3.4 is included in Ubuntu 14.04. Then, your .travis.yml could look like:

install:
    - sudo apt-get install python3-pyside

Build your own wheel

You can build your own PySide wheel so Travis-CI builds using Python3.4 do not have to build PySide from source.

Following these instructions, I built a PySide wheel by:

$ git clone https://github.com/PySide/pyside-setup.git pyside-setup
$ cd pyside-setup
$ python3.4 setup.py bdist_wheel --qmake=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4 --version=1.2.2

You can then host this wheel somewhere, and access it using travis by:

install:
  - sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
  - pip install PySide --no-index --find-links https://<your-site>;
  # Travis CI servers use virtualenvs, so we need to finish the install by the following
  - python ~/virtualenv/python${TRAVIS_PYTHON_VERSION}/bin/pyside_postinstall.py -install

where <your-site> is a webpage that contains a link to the wheel named PySideXXXXXXX.whl, with the correct naming convention. Use --no-index to prevent pip from finding and installing a newer PySide from pypi.

I went ahead and tried this, basic usage works!

See the source.

The wheel is hosted at the repo's gh-pages.

Note on my machine with Ubuntu 14.04, building the wheel created the file dist/PySide-1.2.2-cp34-cp34m-linux_x86_64.whl which was roughly 17 MB. When I instead included the --standalone tag in the build step, the file was ~77 MB.

Note that as of yet, only import PySide has been tested. Due to this being built under Ubuntu 14.04 and Travis-Ci servers running Ubuntu 12.04, I do not know how functional the PySide library is. If you run into problems, you may want to redo this on a machine running Ubuntu 12.04.

Update:

The following python script

import PySide
from PySide import QtGui

fails when the PySide wheel was built on Ubuntu 14.04. See the failure. However, it succeeds when PySide is built on Ubuntu 12.04, see the success.

Using my PySide wheel

In your .travis.yml file, include the following:

install:
  - sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
  - pip install PySide --no-index --find-links https://parkin.github.io/python-wheelhouse/;
  # Travis CI servers use virtualenvs, so we need to finish the install by the following
  - python ~/virtualenv/python${TRAVIS_PYTHON_VERSION}/bin/pyside_postinstall.py -install