Django/Python apps and prerequisites for developer environment

Question

Currently my Django project has a huge readme doc, that any developer, whishing to work on the source, must follow to setup their development environment.

It goes something like this:

Prerequisites:

1. Django Css. See Django CSS.
2. CleverCSS. See Clever CSS.
3. Beautiful Soup. See Beautiful Soup.
4. Dateutil. See python-dateutil.
5. httplib2 http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
6. python-oauth2 https://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2
7. python-twitter http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/

Is there any facility for writting some sort of script that will fetch the dependencies automatically? At least to automate this process partially to something like:

python setup_environment.py

I've looked at setuptools - but it seems to me that it is more for the purpose of installing the app itself onto the system, not fulfilling the developer's requirements for environment setup.

Answer 1

Will pip not do the job?

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html#

You can freeze all requirements on your server to a file (run this on the server):

pip freeze > REQUIREMENTS.txt

and then on your dev environment:

pip install -r ./REQUIREMENTS.txt

to install everything listed in the REQUIREMENTS file.

You should also look at installing virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) as well on your development (and production) server

http://iamzed.com/2009/05/07/a-primer-on-virtualenv/

They allow you to set up multiple encapsulated python environments. This means you can have two django apps set up on the same machine, each with different python versions/python applications/django versions.