How can I make setuptools (or distribute) install a package from the local file system

Question

Is it possible to specify (editable) source dependencies in setup.py that are known to reside on the local file system?

Consider the following directory structure, all of which lives in a single VCS repository:

projects   utils     setup.py     ...   app1      setup.py      ... # app1 files depend on ../utils   app2      setup.py      ... # app2 files depend on ../utils 

Given the following commands:

cd projects mkvirtualenv app1 pip install -e app1 

I'd like to have all the dependencies for app1 installed, including "utils", which is an "editable" dependency. Likewise, if I did the same for app2.

I've tried playing with all different combinations of file://... URLs in install_requires and dependency_links to no avail. I'd like to use a dependency link URL like src+file://../utils, which would tell setuptools that the source for the package is on the file system at this relative path. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

i managed to provide relative local dependency in setup.py with:

setup(     install_requires=[         'utils @ file://localhost/%s/../utils/' % os.getcwd().replace('\\', '/'),         ],     ) 

but maybe someone know better solution

Answer 2

I had an identical problem where I needed to depend on modules in a sibling folder. I was able to find a solution after stumbling upon https://caremad.io/2013/07/setup-vs-requirement/

I ended up requirements.txt to refer specifically to the file I wanted, and then installing everything with

pip install -r requirements.txt 

---

requirements.txt

-e ../utils                                                                                                                                                                     -e . 

And setup.py has all my other dependencies, including utils. When pip tries to install app1 itself, it realizes that the utils dependency has already been filled, and so passes over it, while installing the other requirements.