We're making L5 autonomous cars, but for some reason we can't seem to make L5 autonomous software that "just works". I would like to think that much like you can get in an autonomous car and it gets you to your destination without questions, a piece of software (that either you wrote or can trust) can intelligently figure out how to run itself without complaining, and in a sandboxed fashion that doesn't mess up your system.
The idea of magicimport.py is to allow an arbitrary piece of Python code to fetch its own dependencies and versions at runtime and "just run", no questions asked, without fuss. Behind the hood it uses virtualenv to create a virtual environment and install its dependencies there without messing with your system Python packages.
The ONLY package it will automatically install to your system (and in user-space, only) is virtualenv itself, if you don't already have it. It will not ask you for root permissions. Any other packages will be installed to the virtualenv that it creates.
Normally you would do this:
import tornado
and of course your system may complain that tornado wasn't found. And so you want to create a virtualenv, go Googling for how to create a virtualenv, create the virtualenv, install tornado, and run your python script. Or apt-get install python3-tornado, but you might not get the version you want, and another package may upgrade it to tornado 5.x when you want 4.x.
With magicimport.py you can do this:
from magicimport import magicimport
tornado = magicimport("tornado")
and BAM, you have tornado, no questions asked.
You can even specify a version number that you would like, e.g.
from magicimport import magicimport
tornado = magicimport("tornado", version = "4.5")
and you will get that exact version.
Enjoy!
- Is this production ready?
No. Don't use this in production. This is mostly just a convenience hack for small personal projects.
- Does it work with Python 2?
I think so. I've tested it on 20.04 with 3.8.3 and 18.04 with 2.7.17 and 3.6.9. I haven't tested other configurations.