So I made a small little command-line utility for myself just for practice, but I had a hard time figuring out how to actually turn it into something I can just use on the command line with no fuss. It uses a virtual environment as Python packages should, so it needs to be run in that environment and I was having trouble figuring out how to do it.

But then I remembered that pipx runs application in a virtual environment, and after checking the docs, I found out that it allows installing local packages by just pointing install at the package directory. So I did, and after setting up the command name as a project script that points to main it ended up working.

I haven’t ever heard of anyone doing something like this for a personal program though. Is something like this a bad idea? Is it over engineering or error prone? Is there another way that most people do something like this?

  • dirtyrig@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Perfect use case. pipx is awesome for Python! Glad you found a great easy solution.

    Is it over engineering or error prone?

    Nope. pipx is like a big guard rail to keep you from doing error prone things with system Python.

    In these examples we’ll assume your venv is at /home/TrueBlue/project/venv

    Is there another way…?

    • shebang: Set your #! to point at your Python venv runtime
      #!/home/TrueBlue/project/venv python3
      Now you can just run your Python file and it’ll use the correct Python runtime.
    • poetry can be useful for running personal projects using poetry run.
    • In linux you can use an alias to create to call your venv Python runtime with your package.

    e.g. I want to use a new command named sdf to call my app.

    alias sdf="/home/TrueBlue/project/venv/bin/python3 my_app.py"

    • santaEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Great ideas! You can also set top of script to be:

      #!/usr/bin/env python3

      That way it will work with environment Python. Runs against venv, as well.