I am currently starting a business where I will be providing support to clients directly on their business offices. I need to be able to go to different computers and be able to run custom python scripts, my question is if there's a way to make my python environment portable?
Assuming that your users are running Windows, I see two options here.
If you have already defined which scripts you will be running, compile them into exe files using py2exe, that way you can just plug a USB and run them as needed. (the caveat is that some antivirus will automatically block the unsigned executables)
The other option is to use WinPython, that is a full python environment with a lot of packages already preinstalled that ives in it's own directory. In case you need to install a new package, just use the Powershell or CMD that comes with it and use the preinstalled "pip".
I found something interesting here Portable Python. I use that method to create portable Python 3.9 and 3.10 and everything works so have a look.
I want to distribute a python program on, say, Windows and/or Mac, but I don't want to give the user the headache of ensuring there is an appropriate python runtime installed on their machine. And i don't want to interfere with their machine's configuration by, let's say, requesting root privileges and installing a system-wide python runtime on their system that suits my program specifically because it's too invasive and might cause compatibility collisions with other installed versions of the runtime.
I would much rather have a self-contained executable that could be, for example, stored on a USB flash-drive, inserted into the system, and then maybe with a stepping-stone binary executable that just invokes the device-portable runtime on a python script that I provide, I could then run the program as if it were a self-contained binary executable (with only standard-library dependencies).
A link to this binary executable could be published into main-menu program lists, docks, or desktops. And it could be invoked by shell scripts or other executed-by-proxy mechanisms. Such a no-install/self-contained python program could potentially be a first-class user-invokable application. This is what I want to achieve.
I googled around for projects that provided a device-portable/mobile python installation and so far I've only found portablepython.com. Unfortunately it says the project is discontinued and no download link for the project is provided. it listed some similar projects but they all seemed defunkt or with a very different focus.
Does anyone know of an active project that is or includes such an independent/portable/mobile/no-install distribution for python?
or is there some way i could configure python's build system to build a noinstall-friendly product?
any ideas welcome. thanks for your input!
After more searching I found that Python.org publishes its own standalone-python distribution called the embeddable zip file.
This is exactly what I was searching for. It's a basic python standalone runtime that requires relatively few megabytes of storage.
I started with this embeddable distro and then cajoled a standalone copy of pip to work with it. Problem solved.
Improving upon #oreus2020's answer, you can download the embeddable zip file from here. Then, unzip the compressed file to a folder of your choice. Go to the root of your install and find python._pth file and open it in a text editor. Remove the "#" before import site(This file is the one which manages the environment of the portable install. If you want anything to be recognized by the portable python interpreter, just throw the path in here and that's it!). If you want pip, go to this page and save it in the root of your portable install and run it using the portable python interpreter like ./python get-pip.py from a commandline opened at the root of your install. Pip installed! To use the pip, do ./python -m pip <commands> from the commandline opened at the root of your install and then open the python._pth file and insert the following below the "." ./Lib/site-packages ./Scripts. Voila, you got yourself a python portable install!
My python._pth file looks like:
python39.zip
.
# Uncomment to run site.main() automatically
./Repo
./Repo/Code
./Repo/Code/cogs
./Lib/site-packages
./Scripts
import site
If you are still wondering, here is the link to the one I made for myself.
P.S. Pardon my bad English
My question seems somewhat inane, but I cannot seem to find any resources for what I need to do.
Essentially I'm using my work computer to write python applications in my spare time. I'm using Python Portable (syntax version 3.2) because I do not have administrative access and can't do things with path variables etc.
How (if possible) do I install or import selenium so I can use it in Python Portable?
Thanks all!
Based on answer found Importing modules on portable python
and How to install external libraries with Portable Python?
Check for what import sys; print sys.path says?
It displays the list of directories and zipfiles where portable python looks for modules to import. Just copy your modules into one of those directories or zipfiles, or sys.path.append('/whatever/dir') if you have your modules in /whatever/dir and want to keep them there (the latter approach will last only for the current session, be it interactive or a script's execution).
Also on their FAQs
You don’t have package I need, can I add it?
For simpler packages you can use easy install or even extract them in site-packages folder of
the Portable Python distribution. However some packages are installing additional dependencies
in windows system folders - in this case your Portable Python distribution will not work once
you move it to some other workstation. Make sure to do proper testing !
I'm looking to create the following:
A portable version of python that can be run on any system (with any previous version of python or no python installed) and have it pre-configured with various python packages (ie, django, lxml, pysqlite, etc)
The closest I've found to the above is virtualenv, but this only goes so far.
If I package up a nice virtualenv for python on one machine, it contains sym links to a lot of the libraries it needs. I can take those sym links and convert them to their actual files, but if I try to move this entire directory to another machine, I get seg fault after seg fault.
To launch python on a different machine, I'm using:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=lib/ ./bin/python
and in lib/ I have all of the shared libraries I copied from the original machine. The problem here is these shared libraries might rely on other shared libraries that I'm not including, so executing this on other linux distros does not work. Probably due to it falling back on older shared libaries installed on the system that do not work with what I copied over.
Anyone have an idea on how to get this working? Is this even possible?
EDIT:
To clarify, the desired outcome is to create a tar.gz of a python binary and associated packages (django, lxml, pysqlite, etc) that can be extracted and run on any linux based system, ie (ubuntu 8.04, redhat 5, suse 11, etc), all 32bit distros, where the locally installed version of python doesn't impact what's in the tar.gz.
I just tested this and it works great.
Get the copy of python you want to install and untar it and cd to the untarred folder first.
Also get a copy of setuptools and untar that.
/opt/portapy used below is of course just the name I came up with for this post, it could be any path and the full path should be tarred up and the same path should be used on any systems you put this on due to absolute path linking.
mkdir /opt/portapy
cd <python source dir>
./configure --prefix=/opt/portapy && make && make install
cd <setuptools source dir>
/opt/portapy/bin/python ./setup.py install
Make the virtual env folder inside the portapy folder.
mkdir /opt/portapy/virtenv
/opt/portapy/bin/virtualenv /opt/portapy/virtenv
cd /opt/portapy/virtenv
source bin/activate
Done. You are ready to install all of your libraries here and have the option of creating multiple virtual envs this way.
You can then tar up the whole /opt/portapy folder and transport it to any Linux system of the same arch, within reason I suspect.
I compiled 2.7.5 ond centOS 5.8 64bit and moved the folder to a Cent6.9 system and it runs perfectly.
I don't know how this is even possible. If it were, they woudn't need to distribute binary packages of python for different platforms. You can't simply distribute python that will run on any platform. It has to be built from source for that arch. Virtualenv will expect you to tell it which system python to use (using links).
This pretty much goes for almost any binary package that links against system libs. Again, if it were possible, we wouldn't need any platform specific binary distributions.
You can, however, achieve part of what you want. That is, running python on another machine that doesn't have python installed as long as its the same arch. This is the same concept behind freezing, or py2exe/py2app/pyinstaller. An interpreter is bundled into a standalone environment. So the app can run on any similar platform.
Edit
I just realized that while your question speaks about "system" agnostically, your title contains the reference "linux". There are different flavors of linux, so in order for it to work you would have to build it fat for multiple archs and also completely contain the standalone links. You might try building a package with pyinstaller and using that to include in your project.
You can try just building python from source, in your virtualenv:
$ ./configure --prefix=/path/to/virtualenv && make && make install
If you still have problems with the links to libs, you can also investigate building it statically
I'm not sure that working solely in Python is the way to go here. You might have better luck with Puppet of Chef, which are configuration tools that can be used to create a local environment. There is plenty of code out there to install virtualenv and python on just about any Linux plus OSX (probably not Windows though).
Your workflow would be to install chef or Puppet (your choice), run a script to install the Python you want, then enter a virtualenv and pip install any packages you might need.
Sorry this isn't as easy as virtualenv alone, but it is much more robust.
Well, since I rarely accept "can't be done", there is a way to do it. Warning: it isn't pretty and you should probably look into a different scenario.
What you will need to to is determine a standard location for this top level directory. Second, using that directory as your root you will need to compile Python on each Linux distribution you want to run this on. For this you would use something like "/usr/local/myappname/platform/" to configure and compile Python to live in. In each case substitute "platform" with the name of the platform such as "/usr/local/rhel/". If memory serves the configure option you are looking for here is --prefix.
Once you have each distribution compiled you will need a script to determine which one to use and either set environment variables or have it create symlinks to the appropriate "installation" of python. I would then use virtualenv and bootstrap in that tree to keep the "in-use" python libraries even more specific.
I can't think of a common Linux distribution that doesn't have Python by default. As such you could use setup.py and/or basic python scripts to script this out since you should be able to rely in Python being present - even if its ye olde version as in RHEL installs. Personally I find the above method overly complicated but it would meet your stated requirements with the allowance for a final script. Of course, you could use shar (SHell ARchive) to tar all of this into a runnable shell script to do the installation and avoid the need for secondary scripts. If you gzip the resulting shel archive then you can decompress it on target systems and execute it to set everything up.
All that said, I would not recommend this. I would recommend determining the minimum Python version you can run on and ensuring that is installed by the distribution whenever possible and if needs be pulling down from a repo and installing. Then, use virtualenv and bootstrap with a requirements.txt to install necessary python libraries and apps into the virutalenv. For that see this documentation
I faced the same problem, so I created PortableVirtualenv. Your Question is just the definition of it.
I use it as a base for commercial multiplatform app I develop. (But PortableVirtualenv is public domain - use it freely.)
If needed, you can pip-install any package and zip the whole directory to distribute also packages you need.
One nice option is to make a "snap" portable linux application. They have a python mode which lets you specify you specify exactly what modules you need. From https://snapcraft.io/first-snap#python :
Snaps let you distribute a dependency-isolated Python app in an app store experience for end users.
Another option is to containerize your application with something like docker. Then instead of executing your script directly, the user is actually running a small OS with just your application and its dependencies. https://www.infoq.com/articles/docker-executable-images/ has more about executable containers.
Container images can also be used for short lived processes: a containerized executable meant to be run on your computer. These containers execute a single task, are short lived and can generally be removed after use. We call these executable images. Examples are compilers (Golang) or build tools (Maven), presentation software (I love to hack a simple presentation in Markdown format and let a RevealJS Docker image serve that) and browsers (a fresh contained browser to follow that fishy link). A real evangelist for executable images is Docker's own Jessie Frazelle. To get some great inspiration be sure to read her blog about them or check out this presentation at DockerCon 2015.
I am writing a quite large Python application; the application is actually to a large part a wrapping of several shared libraries written in C and C++(Qt). I am 'installing' this without administrator rights, so everything including shared libraries, binary and also Python modules must be in non-standard locations, i.e. I have a situation like this:
Shared libraries in /funny/path/lib
Python modules installed in /funny/path/python/lin
The python interpreter itself might also be in /nonstandard/location
The whole thing is distributed as open source, and I need to find a reasonably elegant and simple way to set the necessary environment variables. The whole thing is distributed with version control software; so the environment variables must be set in some 'local addition' i.e. something like:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH /funny/path/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PYTHONPATH /funn/path/python/lib:$PYTHONPATH
#
exec python main.py
But I am programming in Python for a reason - I detest these shell scripts. Any views on the most elegant way to do this would be nice.
Joakim
Why waste time detesting shell scripts?
Since you won't install in a standard location, (and can't seem to get sys admins to install needed packages in standard locations) that's almost your only alternative.
You can set the PYTHONPATH from within Python. It's in sys.path. Setting an environment variable (like LD_LIBRARY_PATH) is harder, because Linux limits the ways in which applications can change the environment.
You can use os.exec to run a process in a modified environment. It's a little odd using Python to then do os.exec..e() to invoke Python, but it is an easy way to set an additional environment variable.