pyenv-virtualenv VS Poetry

First of all, install the Python virtual environment from these links: 1 and 2. I developed my GPT-based API in Python version 3.8.18. Pick any Python versions >= 3.7.

git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv.git $(pyenv root)/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv

Install pyenv-virtualenv plugin from repository (in never versions it's included in pyenv.run script I think)

> trying to build a lifeboat for Twitter, Python works, but then modules require builds that break.

> Alternatively, any good resources for the above?

There are many, _unbelievably many_ writeups and tools for Python building and packaging. Some of them are really neat! But paralysis of choice is real. So is the reality that many of the new/fully integrated/cutting edge tools, however superior they may be, just won't get long term support to catch on and stay relevant.

When getting started with Python, I very personally like to choose from a few simple options (others are likely to pipe up with their own, and that's great; mine aren't The One Right Way, just some fairly cold/mainstream takes).

1. First pick what stack you'll be using to develop and test software. In Python this is sadly often going to be different from the stack you'll use to deploy/run it in production, but here we are. There are two sub-choices to be made here:

1.a. How will you be running the _python interpreter_ in dev/test? "I just want to use the Python that came with my laptop" is fine to a point, but breaks down a lot sooner than folks expect (again, the reasons for this are variously reasonable and stupid, but here we are). Personally, I like pyenv (https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv) here. It's a simple tool that builds interpreters on your system and provides shell aliases to adjust pathing so they can optionally be used. At the opposite extreme from pyenv, some folks choose Python-in-Docker here (pros: reproducible, makes deployment environments very consistent with dev; cons: IDE/quick build-and-run automations get tricker). There are some other tools that wrap/automate the same stuff that pyenv does.

1.b. How will you be isolating your project's dependencies? "I want to install dependencies globally" breaks down (or worse, breaks your laptop!) pretty quickly, yes it's a bummer. There are three options here: if you really eschew automations/wrappers/thick tools in general, you can do this yourself (i.e. via "pip install --local", optionally in a dedicated development workstation user account); you can use venv (https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html stdlib version of virtualenv, yes the names suck and confusing, here we are etc. etc.), which is widely standardized upon and manually use "pip install" while inside your virtualenv, and you can optionally integrate your virtualenv with pyenv so "inside your virtualenv" is easy to achieve via pyenv-virtualenv (https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv); or you can say "hell with this, I want maximum convenience via a wrapper that manages my whole project" and use Poetry (https://python-poetry.org/). There's no right point on that spectrum, it's up to you to decide where you fall on the "I want an integrated experience and to start prototyping quickly" versus "I want to reduce customizations/wrappers/tooling layers" spectrum.

2. Then, pick how you'll be developing said software: what frameworks or tools you'll be using. A Twitter lifeboat sounds like a webapp, so you'll likely want a web framework. Python has a spectrum of those of varying "thickness"/batteries-included-ness. At the minimum of thickness are tools like Flask (https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.2.x/) and Sanic (like Flask, but with a bias towards performance at the cost of using async and some newer Python programming techniques which tend, in Python, to be harder than the traditional Flask approach: https://sanic.dev). At the maximum of thickness are things like Django/Pyramid. With the minimally-thick frameworks you'll end up plugging together other libraries for things like e.g. database access or web content serving/templating, with the maximally-thick approach that is included but opinionated. Same as before: no right answers, but be clear on the axis (or axes) along with you're choosing.

3. Choose how you'll be deploying/running the software, maybe after prototyping for awhile. This isn't "lock yourself into a cloud provider/hosting platform", but rather a choice about what tools you use with the hosting environment. Docker is pretty uncontentious here, if you want a generic way to run your Python app on many environments. So is "configure Linux instances to run equivalent Python/package versions to your dev/test environment". If you choose the latter, be aware that (and this is very important/often not discussed) many tools that the Python community suggests for local development or testing are very unsuitable for managing production environments (e.g. a tool based around shell state mutation is going to be extremely inconvenient to productionize).

Yeah, that's a lot of choices, but in general there are some pretty obvious/uncontentious paths there. Pyenv-for-interpreters/Poetry-for-packaging-and-project-management/Flask-for-web-serving/Docker-for-production is not going to surprise anyone or break any assumptions. Docker/raw-venv/Django is going to be just as easy to Google your way through.

Again, no one obvious right way (ha!) but plenty of valid options!

Not sure if that's what you were after. If you want a "just show me how to get started"-type writeup rather than an overview on the choices involved, I'm sure folks here or some quick googling will turn up many!

For this, I will use pyenv and the pyenv-virtualenv tools.

I would suggest using pyenv and the pyenv-virtualenv plugin to manage various python versions and virtualenvs

To help, check out pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv (or pyenv with Poetry if you want the new hotness). You essentially can install multiple python versions and create a virtualenv that uses a specific python version. So you could have `myapp-3.7` and `myapp-3.10` each isolated with their own package versions, etc.

Recently moved to Windows from Linux and was looking for a replacement for pyenv which I was using to manage multiple versions of Python. Found pyenv-win but it was missing the pyenv-virtualenv plugin which can be used to create virtualenvs for different Python versions. Frustrated with the lack of options, I decided to create my own CLI called pyenv-win-venv to do the same thing. I created it only for my personal use but later decided to open source it so it has some of the basic features of pyenv-virtualenv and I hope it is useful to other users of pyenv-win.

Pyenv lets you install different versions of python on your system simultaneously, without breaking a thing. You can switch between any of them in one command. You can also bind a specific version to a directory, which will activate every time you enter it. There is an extension that adds support for virtual environments.

You can manage dependencies in Python with the package manager pip, which comes pre-installed with Python. Pip allows you to install and uninstall Python packages, and it uses a requirements.txt file to keep track of which packages your project depends on. However, pip does not have robust dependency resolution features or isolate dependencies for different projects; this is where tools like pipenv and poetry come in. These tools create a virtual environment for each project, separating the project's dependencies from the system-wide Python environment and other projects.

Poetry provides packaging and dependency management for Python. If you haven't already, install poetry via pip:

Poetry

The Semantify repository provides an example Astro.js project. Ensure you have poetry installed, then build the project from the root of the repository:

Has anyone else been paying attention to how hilariously hard it is to package PyTorch in poetry?

https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/6409

Based on this comment 5 days ago[0], it's working? I'm not sure didn't dig in too far but based on that comment it seems fair to say that it's not fully Poetry's fault because torch removed hashes (which poetry needs to be effective) for a while only recently adding it back in.

Not sure where I would stand if I fully investigated it tho.

[0] https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/6409#issuecom...

We will be running this project in Python 3.10 on Mac/Linux, and we will use Poetry to manage our dependencies. Later, we will bundle our app into a container using docker for deployment.

Here are the two main packaging issues I run into, specifically when using Poetry:

1) Lack of support for building extension modules (as mentioned by the article). There is a workaround using an undocumented feature [0], which I've tried, but ultimately decided it was not the right approach. I still use Poetry, but build the extension as a separate step in CI, rather than kludging it into Poetry.

2) Lack of support for offline installs [1], e.g. being able to download the dependencies, copy them to another machine, and perform the install from the downloaded dependencies (similar to using "pip --no-index --find-links=."). Again, you can work around this (by using "poetry export --with-credentials" and "pip download" for fetching the dependencies, then firing up pypiserver [2] to run a local PyPI server on the offline machine), but ideally this would all be a first class feature of Poetry, similar to how it is in pip.

I don't have the capacity to create Pull Requests for addressing these issues with Poetry, and I'm very grateful for the maintainers and those who do contribute. Instead, on the linked issues I share my notes on the matter, in the hope that it may at least help others and potentially get us closer to a solution.

Regardless, I'm sticking with Poetry for now. Though to be fair, the only other Python packaging tools I've used extensively are Pipenv and pip/setuptools. It's time consuming to thoroughly try out these other packaging tools, and is generally lower priority than developing features/fixing bugs, so it's helpful to read about the author's experience with these other tools, such as PDM and Hatch.

[0] https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/2740

[1] https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/2184

[2] https://pypi.org/project/pypiserver/

We believe that poetry is currently the best tool for this purpose, besides of being the most popular one at the moment. This is why we will use poetry to manage the dependencies of our project throughout this series of posts. Poetry allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on, and it will manage (install/update) them for you. Poetry also allows you to package your project into a distributable format and publish it to a repository, such as PyPI. We strongly recommend you to learn more about this tool by reading the official documentation.

I started using poetry. The problem is poetry will not install if there is dependency conflict and there is no way to ignore: github