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How to "include" third party modules into my python script to make it portable?

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python

I've developed a little script that searches through a wallpaper database online and download the wallpapers, I want to give this script to another person that isn't exactly good with computers and I'm kinda starting with python so I don't know how to include the "imports" of the third party modules in my program so it can be 100% portable, Is there something that can help me do this? or I will have to enter and analyse my third party modules and copy&paste the functions that I use?

like image 910
Eduardo Avatar asked Oct 14 '12 02:10

Eduardo


1 Answers

Worse thing to do

An easy thing you can do is simply bundle the other modules in with your code. That does not mean that you should copy/paste the functions from the other modules into your code--you should definitely not do that, since you don't know what dependencies you'll be missing. Your directory structure might look like:

/myproject
    mycode.py
    thirdpartymodule1.py
    thirdpartymodule2.py
    thirdpartymodule3/
        <contents>

Better thing to do

The real best way to do this is include a list of dependencies (usually called requirements.txt) in your Python package that Python's package installer, pip, could use to automatically download. Since that might be a little too complicated, you could give your friend these instructions, assuming Mac or Linux:

  1. Run $ curl http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py | python. This provides you with tools you'll need to install the package manager.
  2. Run $ curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python. This installs the package manager.
  3. Give your friend a list of the names of the third-party Python modules you used in your code. For purposes of this example, we'll say you used requests, twisted, and boto.
  4. Your friend should run from command line $ pip install <list of package names>. In our example, that would look like $ pip install requests twisted boto.
  5. Run the Python code! The lines like import boto should then work, since your friend will have the packages installed on their computer.
like image 168
jdotjdot Avatar answered Sep 28 '22 02:09

jdotjdot