"pip wheel" does nothing if a wheel is available from PyPI

[rassie]

Use case: I'm preparing a wheelhouse with dependencies for our product as wheels. The installation afterwards is supposed to run only from these wheels, i.e. also with --no-index.

However, pip wheel fails to actually download a wheel if it's available from PyPI. For example, I would like to have a wheel for setuptools locally:

$ mkvirtualenv wheel
[....]
$ pip install setuptools==1.3.1 wheel https://github.com/pypa/pip/archive/develop.zip
[....]
$ pip wheel setuptools==1.3.1
Downloading/unpacking setuptools==1.3.1
  Downloading setuptools-1.3.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (549kB): 549kB downloaded
Building wheels for collected packages: setuptools
  Skipping building wheel: https://pypi.python.org/packages/3.3/s/setuptools/setuptools-1.3.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl#md5=e39a9b0e37005b4cd5e0d328cb88fd77
Cleaning up...

I would expect pip wheel to create correct wheels in every possible way: by compiling, downloading or otherwise. It should only skip doing anything if there is a correct wheel file in the target directory.

[qwcode]

I agree it should find the setuptools wheel and place it into your wheelhouse. marking this as a bug.

[akheron]

I'm having the same issue with django-appconf.

[akheron]

Actually, my problem is that I'm trying to update my wheelhouse when requirements.txt is updated. For that, I invoke pip wheel --wheel-dir=wheelhouse --use-wheel --find-links=wheelhouse. This builds all updated requirements as wheels and saves them to wheelhouse, except for those that already have a wheel available on PyPI.

[jbalonso]

This is a bit of a brutal hack, but this is my workaround:

mkdir -p "${WHEELHOUSE}/cache"
pip wheel --use-wheel -w "${WHEELHOUSE}" -f "${WHEELHOUSE}" -r "${REQUIREMENTS}" --download-cache "${WHEELHOUSE}/cache"

echo CACHE: ${WHEELHOUSE}/cache
for x in "${WHEELHOUSE}/cache"/*.whl; do
        echo ...copying "${x##*%2F}"
        cp $x "${WHEELHOUSE}/${x##*%2F}"
done

[akheron]

@jbalonso Thanks, works like a charm!

[Dr-Bean]

I have a similar situation, although in our case the issue is not directly related to PyPI, but using --no-index --find-links="wheelhouse".

We have been using pip bundle for application packaging, but my goal now is to set up a central wheelhouse (similar to PyPI) to store wheels after building them.
Using a requirements file, the needed wheels should be copied from the central wheelhouse to a 'package wheelhouse', for distributing together with the application in a package, and ultimately, client-side installation. However, we run into the same message with that approach.

[GaretJax]

+1 for me as well.

[Ivoz]

If the behaviour were to change so that pip instead did not ignore packages already found as wheels (i.e. cache all packages requested, as wheels full stop), which I think is a more sensible and intuitive default, I'm wondering if there's a use case to warrant adding a flag to revert to the current behaviour?

[mitsuhiko]

This is also currently different behavior than the documentation suggests.

[qwcode]

let me add a warning in the docs for now, until this get's fixed.
(6d25e12)

[leo-the-manic]

If I'm not mistaken, this issue tracks the bug discussed in the article "Python on Wheels?" (See here)

[qwcode]

I'm working on this, so should have a PR soon.

[qwcode]

closing due to merge of #1524
for those following this issue, please try from the develop branch

[Dr-Bean]

Tested, works for my use-case (local wheelhouse). Downloading PyPI wheels works too. Thanks!

[Fiedzia]

Any chance to make 1.5.3 with this fix? Right now stable pip version is just broken, and 1.6 may be months away (guessing from release history).

[qwcode]

@Fiedzia yes I was thinking the same (along with #1527)

@pfmoore , @dstufft thoughts?

[pfmoore]

@qwcode I'm happy enough to see a new release (but I'm not the one doing the work :-)) It would be good to get this fix into the version shipped with Python 3.4.

[dstufft]

Seems reasonable to me to roll this into the 1.5.X branch.

[qwcode]

ok, I'll push it over later.

[qwcode]

I have the push ready, but too many problems atm, due to bitbucket being down
will wait til later.

[qwcode]

ok, pushed to 1.5.X (along with #1527) with a successful travis build.

[sebastianneubauer]

Mmmh, this bug actually was a feature for me: I was happy that in the wheel dir only those packages ended up which are not already found somewhere (--find-links). This is really helpfull if you need to build/maintain a local (no access to pypi.python.org) wheelhouse, in my case a local devpi. Maybe it would be possible to introduce a --no-copy flag if someone only wants to have those wheels which are not already existing and just copied? Best would be if one could specify from where the wheels are copied (outside firewall e.g. pypi.python.org) and from where not (inside firewall, local wheelhouse)

[qwcode]

a --no-copy flag seems reasonable to me.

[sublee]

+1 for --no-copy.

[flaugher]

I'd like to be able to "pip wheel --wheel-dir=/path -r requirements.txt regardless of whether there's a PypI wheel so that I always have a backup I can use. I'd think this would be desirable since it would reduce PyPI traffic.