Installing from github

[hhoeflin]

Hi,

thanks for flit, I really like it. One question I had was that pip supports installation from github via the
'git+https://github.com ....' notation. But if I include that in the requirements, I get an error that it can't be parsed.

what would your recommended way to be use it like this?

Thanks

[takluyver]

I'm not quite sure what you mean. If you're trying to install something that's packaged with Flit from GitHub, that should work, but you might need to upgrade to the latest pip.

If you're trying to include something in the requirements of your package, it doesn't exactly work like that (this is true whether you use Flit or a setup.py file). For some background on why, see this blog post. You can specify a fixed URL for a package (see an example here), but then it's completely fixed - you don't benefit from pip picking the newest compatible version, or selecting a package to fit the platform it's installing on.

[pradyunsg]

And, just to be complete: you might need to use package-name @ git+... syntax for specifying packages.

[hhoeflin]

Thanks @takluyver and @pradyunsg, that worked. using package-name @ git+....

Thanks for the pointer that the version and link would be fixed - the only reason I do this is that I depend on a package that only exists on github.

If this was part of the docs, would be great. There is a lot of hard to parse information out there on how to specify these things

[pradyunsg]

FWIW, I'm hoping to make the "pip-specific" vs "general and will work with all tools" requirement syntax more clearly documented in pip's documentation in the coming weeks.

[wrosko]

@hhoeflin Did you get this working in your pyproject.toml file? Can you give a code snippet example? Does the package have to be a "release" or can it simply be the url of the repo.

[hhoeflin]

I use a package called 'topk', and it is only available on github. I reference like this:

"topk@git+https://github.com/oval-group/smooth-topk"

inside the dependencies list. Simply the url of the repo. But you have to give the name of the package, it is not inferred from the url repo name.

[takluyver]

You can see the relevant spec about this 'direct URL' format here:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0440/#direct-references

As far as I know, you can't combine this with version specifiers (e.g. >= 4.0). So it's still a good idea for packages to be uploaded to PyPI (or another index) if possible.