How to install packages offline?

Question

What\'s the best way to download a python package and it\'s dependencies from pypi for offline installation on another machine? Is there any easy way to do this with pip or

Answer 1

If the package is on PYPI, download it and its dependencies to some local directory. E.g.

$ mkdir /pypi && cd /pypi
$ ls -la
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff   237954 Apr 19 11:31 Flask-WTF-0.6.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff   389741 Feb 22 17:10 Jinja2-2.6.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff    70305 Apr 11 00:28 MySQL-python-1.2.3.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff  2597214 Apr 10 18:26 SQLAlchemy-0.7.6.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff  1108056 Feb 22 17:10 Werkzeug-0.8.2.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff   488207 Apr 10 18:26 boto-2.3.0.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--   1 pavel  staff   490192 Apr 16 12:00 flask-0.9-dev-2a6c80a.tar.gz

Some packages may have to be archived into similar looking tarballs by hand. I do it a lot when I want a more recent (less stable) version of something. Some packages aren't on PYPI, so same applies to them.

Suppose you have a properly formed Python application in ~/src/myapp. ~/src/myapp/setup.py will have install_requires list that mentions one or more things that you have in your /pypi directory. Like so:

  install_requires=[
    'boto',
    'Flask',
    'Werkzeug',
    # and so on

If you want to be able to run your app with all the necessary dependencies while still hacking on it, you'll do something like this:

$ cd ~/src/myapp
$ python setup.py develop --always-unzip --allow-hosts=None --find-links=/pypi

This way your app will be executed straight from your source directory. You can hack on things, and then rerun the app without rebuilding anything.

If you want to install your app and its dependencies into the current python environment, you'll do something like this:

$ cd ~/src/myapp
$ easy_install --always-unzip --allow-hosts=None --find-links=/pypi .

In both cases, the build will fail if one or more dependencies aren't present in /pypi directory. It won't attempt to promiscuously install missing things from Internet.

I highly recommend to invoke setup.py develop ... and easy_install ... within an active virtual environment to avoid contaminating your global Python environment. It is (virtualenv that is) pretty much the way to go. Never install anything into global Python environment.

If the machine that you've built your app has same architecture as the machine on which you want to deploy it, you can simply tarball the entire virtual environment directory into which you easy_install-ed everything. Just before tarballing though, you must make the virtual environment directory relocatable (see --relocatable option). NOTE: the destination machine needs to have the same version of Python installed, and also any C-based dependencies your app may have must be preinstalled there too (e.g. say if you depend on PIL, then libpng, libjpeg, etc must be preinstalled).