What is this?

A thin shell around npm for installing Python libraries

Installation

npm i -g pykg

Usage

Initialize your package.json

# Inside your new project's directory root
npm init

or if you prefer yarn

yarn init

Add some dependencies

pykg install requests django

Run an npm script

NB: Only npm start is supported now

pykg start # equivalent to npm start, with $PYTHONPATH set appropriately

Known limitations

• Doesn't support libraries with native extensions
• I only have 7 Python libraries up on the NPM registry so far
• Doesn't do dependency resolution from requirements.txt
• Doesn't add scripts from libraries to your PATH

FAQs

Why?

To see if it could be done

No seriously...why?

I like npm/yarn. I thought this would be a good way to learn how Python libraries actually get installed.

Are there any advantages to using this?

• You can take advantage of NPM/yarn features such as local caching for offline installs, lockfiles etc.
• package.json is a standard in the NPM-world. setup.py and requirements.txt fulfill some of the functions but not all
• You don't need virtualenv. npm/yarn installs dependencies into node_modules by default and pykg sets the PYTHONPATH so that imports just work when invoking package.json scripts