Manuscript

Manuscript helps you manage your python scripts and their dependencies

Python still is a scripting language, and it is awesome for this. Moreover, we now have some great libraries that make writing scripts even easier, like requests, docopt or pathlib. However, having to install them system-wide, or start worrying about virtualenv for just one script is annoying. Manuscript is here to help you handle that.

Just add a line of the form #deps: requests docopt pathlib to your script, and manuscript will install them in a virtualenv and create a wrapper for you.

Install

You can get it on pypi with the usual pip install manuscript.

You can also install manuscript using manuscript! For this, use this line get manuscript and its dependencies, and use manuscript to install itself:

cd /tmp && wget https://bitbucket.org/pitrou/pathlib/raw/e39c980b59a9705fe60f24e36cb202771af88256/pathlib.py https://raw.github.com/docopt/docopt/0.6.1/docopt.py https://raw.github.com/madjar/manuscript/master/manuscript.py && python3 manuscript.py install -c manuscript.py

Once it's done, I recommend you add ~/.manuscript/bin/ to your path, to make it easier to access installed scripts.

Manuscript requires python 3 to work (but is able to handle scripts written for any python version or intepreter).

Usage

You just wrote some_awesome_script.py that uses requests and docopt, and you want to use it on your system without worrying about the dependencies. Just add this line somewhere in your script:

#deps requests docopt

Then run manuscript:

manuscript install some_awesome_script.py

This will install all the dependencies in a virtualenv and create a wrapper around the script as ~/.manuscript/bin/some_awesome_script.

The virtualenv will use the interpreter mentioned in the script's shebang, falling back to python if none is found. You can force an interpreter with the -i option, like so:

manuscript install some_awesome_script.py -i pypy

If you don't want a script to share the default virtualenv with other scripts, you can specify a virtualenv name in which to install the script's dependencies (it will be created if needed):

manuscript install some_awesome_script.py -e awesome-venv

If you want to reuse an env created by virtualenv-wrapper, you can pass workon:NAME as the environment name. Manuscript will use the WORKON_HOME environment variable to find it. If it does not exist, manuscript will not create it.

If you edit you script to add more dependencies, just run:

manuscript check-deps

This will install all missing dependencies for all the scripts.

Finally, if you want to use manuscript on a script that won't last (something downloaded from the internet that sits on your /tmp for example), just add the -c argument: manuscript will first copy the script to a safe place, then do the whole dance.

Contribute

The source code is available on github.

Bug reports and pull requests welcomed !

Author

This project is made by Georges Dubus <georges.dubus@gmail.com>. You can find me on twitter: @georgesdubus.