Robust way to ensure other people can run my python program

Question

I wish to place a python program on GitHub and have other people download and run it on their computers with assorted operating systems. I am relatively new to python but have u

Answer 1

The best tool I have used so far for this is Pipenv. Not only it unifies and simplifies the whole pip+virtualenv workflow for you, developer, but it also guarantees that the exact versions of all dependencies (including Python itself) are met when other people run your project with it.

The project website does a pretty good job at explaining how to use the tool, but, for completeness sake, I'll give a short explanation here.

Once you have Pipenv installed (for instance, by running pip install --user pipenv), you can go to the directory of your project and run pipenv --python 3.7, so Pipenv will create a new virtualenv for your project, create a Pipfile and a Pipfile.lock (more on them later). If you go ahead and run pipenv install -r requirements.txt it will install all your packages. Now you can do a pipenv shell to activate your new virtualenv, or a pipenv run your_main_file.py to simply run your project.

Now let's take a look at the contents of your Pipfile. It should be something resembling this:

[packages]
Django = "*"
djangorestframework = "*"
iso8601 = "*"
graypy = "*"
whitenoise = "*"

[requires]
python_version = "3.7"

This file has the human-readable specifications for the dependencies of your project (note that it specifies the Python version too). If your requirements.txt had pinned versions, your Pipfile could have them too, but you can safely wildcard them, because the exact versions are stored in the Pipfile.lock. Now you can run things like pipenv update to update your dependencies and don't forget to commit Pipfile and Pipfile.lock to your VCS.

Once people clone your project, all they have to do is run pipenv install and Pipenv will take care of the rest (it may even install the correct version of Python for them).

I hope this was useful. I'm not affiliated in any way with Pipenv, just wanted to share this awesome tool.