py-autoinstall

A script to facilitate automatic installation of Python modules.

Context

A typical Python pattern to not bother installing dependencies before running a script is the following:

try:
    import requests
except ModuleNotFoundError:
    subprocess.call(["pip", "install", "requests"])
finally:
    import requests

However, using this pattern for each import is cumbersome. To automate this, you can use the py-autoinstall tool.

Usage

Say you have the following script example.py:

import time

import requests

print("Querying Google at timestamp {}...\n".format(int(time.time())))

resp = requests.get("https://google.fr")
print("Status: {}".format(resp.status_code))

You run it without installing dependencies and it fails: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'requests'.

To fix this, you just have to onboard it to py-autoinstall:

./onboard-autoinstall.sh example.py

This will edit the script with some helpers. These helpers are actually a block at the beginning of the file and a block at the end. You are free to continue editing your script in between. If you just run it, it will automatically install missing dependencies! Isn't that fantastic?

python example.py

Collecting requests
Downloading requests-2.31.0-py3-none-any.whl (62 kB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 62.6/62.6 kB 4.2 MB/s eta 0:00:00
(...)
Installing collected packages: requests
Successfully installed requests-2.31.0

Querying Google at timestamp 1694715099...

Status: 200

See script with helpers

# Enable autoinstall
exec(__import__("inspect").getsource(__import__("sys").modules[__name__])[-567:].replace("# ", ""))
# Your script starts here
import time

import requests

print("Querying Google at timestamp {}...\n".format(int(time.time())))

resp = requests.get("https://google.fr")
print("Status: {}".format(resp.status_code))

# Autoinstall helper. Keep this block at the end of the file
# src = __import__("inspect").getsource(__import__("sys").modules[__name__])[147:-627]
# new_src = ""
# for line in src.split("\n"):
#     if not line.startswith("import "):
#         new_src += line + "\n"
#         continue
#     module = line.split(" ")[1]
#     new_src += (
#         "try:\n"
#         "    import {module}\n"
#         "except ModuleNotFoundError:\n"
#         "    __import__('subprocess').call(['pip', 'install', '{module}'])\n"
#         "finally:\n"
#         "    import {module}\n"
#     ).format(module=module)
# exec(new_src)
# exit()