Quick and handy wheel package format for Python applications

22 October 2013 Comments

Python packaging needs some help. A solution to at least some problems may be wheel - a new format for fast and efficient software installation and distribution. It's described in few PEPs and now it's starting to take shape. It was showcased recently on PyCon PL 2013.

There is nearly no wheels on pypi but we can use them locally to make local installations faster (handy for continuous integration systems and alike that build a project from scratch often).

Installing wheel

You will need a recent version of pip and distribute (as described in the documentation). In old virtualenvs or systems execute:

pip install --upgrade pip distribute

Then install wheel:

pip install wheel

Creating wheels

To build wheels out of existing pypi packages you need to specify the packages and a local path for wheels:

pip wheel --wheel-dir=/wheel/folder PACKAGE_NAME

To install from local wheel folder just use:

pip install --use-wheel --no-index --find-links=/wheel/folder PACKAGE_NAME

If you have your own local Python package you can build a wheel from setup.py:

python setup.py bdist_wheel

It works with distribute (but not with distutils). As a result you will get "whl" packages like those:

Django-1.5.4-py2.py3-none-any.whl Pillow-2.2.1-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl

Pillow is binary so it has the arch for which it have been built.

As an extra you also get "wheel" command that can operate on wheel packages (see "wheel help").

The speed boost

Django doesn't require compilation but it also doesn't install instantly. I've excluded download (pip install --no-install django) and measured install time (pip install --no-download django) on my computer:

real    0m3.109s
user    0m2.732s
sys    0m0.994s

Installing from wheel:

real    0m1.072s
user    0m0.763s
sys    0m0.308s

For Pillow compilation takes some time:

real    0m11.265s
user    0m10.183s
sys    0m1.178s

But with wheel it's a snap:

real    0m0.170s
user    0m0.135s
sys    0m0.035s

Even packages like Django can take advantage of the new package format. All binary packages will just install without the need of waiting for compilation to end. Nowadays it's mostly handy for build-testing (like continuous integration repeating tasks) and maybe deploying also.

RkBlog

Django web framework tutorials, 22 October 2013

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As times change and JavaScript frameworks don't just download to your static folder I'll start with setting up Ember.js development environment with ember-cli.

Check out PyCon PL 2015 agenda

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The agenda and other details can be found on the conference website.

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