Beeper

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Beeper is a tool for Python that simplified distribution on Unix servers. It defines a compact and self-contained way for offline installation. The aim of beeper is to pre-download all dependencies and pre-compile all assets before deployment.

The principles of Beeper are:

  • No build infrastructure on production server;
  • No network call on production server;
  • No vague version of dependencies.

Beeper need you to have:

  • wheel, virtualenv, pip installed;
  • normally seen Unix command: unzip, tar, grep;
  • requirements.txt in root of your project.

You can get the tool directly from PyPI:

$ pip install beeper

To create a beeper distribution, you need to define build information and run build command.

Beeper parse a YAML file, default beeper.yml, to read build information. For example, a Flask example might be like this:

application: example
manifest:
  - app.py

Running build command is simple::

$ beeper build --version 1

If you build project from a git repo, you can always get version from a git log command::

$ beeper build --version `git log -1 --format=%h`

Once build done, it will have created a tar file generated in dist folder with all dependencies and an installation script. You can then distribute this file to remote servers and install it::

$ scp dist/example-1.tgz deploy@server:/var/www/example/example-1.tgz
$ ssh deploy@server
deploy $ cd /var/www/example/
deploy $ tar -xzf example-1.tgz
deploy $ ./install.sh