Easiest way to automatically download required modules in Python?

Question

I would like to release a python module I wrote which depends on several packages. What's the easiest way to make it so these packages are programmatically downloaded just in case they are not available on the system that's being run? Most of these modules should be available by easy_install or pip or something like that. I simply want to avoid having the user install each module separately.

thanks.

Answer 1

pip uses requirements files, which have a very straightforward format.

For more Python packaging tooling recommendations, see the latest from the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA).

Answer 2

See the setuptools docs on how to declare your dependencies -- this will allow easy_install to find, download and install all of them (and transitive closure thereof) if everything's available in PyPi, or otherwise if you specify the dependencies' URLs.