Installing Blocks by Running setup.py

[rizar]

I did not find an instruction on how to install Blocks from a cloned repo by running setup.py. Simply running it does not work:

╰─$ python setup.py develop --user                     
running develop
running egg_info
writing requirements to blocks.egg-info/requires.txt
writing blocks.egg-info/PKG-INFO
writing top-level names to blocks.egg-info/top_level.txt
writing dependency_links to blocks.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
reading manifest file 'blocks.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
writing manifest file 'blocks.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
running build_ext
Creating /home/rizar/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/blocks.egg-link (link to .)
blocks 0.1a1 is already the active version in easy-install.pth
Installing blocks-continue script to /home/rizar/.local/bin
Installing blocks-dump script to /home/rizar/.local/bin
Installing blocks-plot script to /home/rizar/.local/bin

Installed /home/rizar/Dist/blocks
Processing dependencies for blocks==0.1a1
Searching for fuel
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/fuel/
Couldn't find index page for 'fuel' (maybe misspelled?)
Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/

[bartvm]

pip install . -r requirements.txt is what you need. The problem is that we rely on both fuel and picklable-itertools which aren't on PyPI. setup.py does not provide any way to provide alternative sources (like GitHub repos), so that's why you need pip to process requirements.txt.

[bartvm]

Oh, and if you want to install in development mode without root access, something pip install . -e -r requirements.txt --user should work.

[rizar]

Thanks! It works nice, I will add it to the docs.

The correct command is pip install -r requirements.txt --user -e .

[madisonmay]

It should actually be possible to configure setup.py to pull packages from github as opposed to PyPI.
http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/dependencies.html#packages-not-on-pypi

[bartvm]

That's deprecated I'm afraid, and might be removed in the future. In some versions of pip it also results in a whole bunch of warnings, and the need to pass switches like --allow-external.

This is a pretty nice blogpost from one of the pip developers describing the relationship between setup.py and requirements.txt (the first one being abstract, the second one concrete), which is what I'm following: https://caremad.io/2013/07/setup-vs-requirement/

[madisonmay]

Huh, thanks for the explanation. I can't find anything about dependency_links being deprecated (the setuptools docs don't seem to mention it), but the rationale explained in the caremade.io blogpost makes sense.

[bartvm]

Oh, I meant deprecated by pip. Support was actually briefly removed in pypa/pip#1519, but later re-introduced in pypa/pip#1955. Not sure what the future plans are now, but it's definitely still considered bad practice I think.

[madisonmay]

Ah gotcha -- thanks for the clarification.