I’m writing a Python app to deploy on Heroku. Per Heroku’s guide, I need to list package requirements in a Pip requirements.txt file. The guide instructs me to install the packages locally, then run pip freeze > requirements.txt to write the frozen requirements file.
However, one of the packages I want to use in deployment on Heroku can’t be installed locally. It’s incompatible with my operating system.
So how do I write a requirements.txt including this package suitable for Heroku?
The only way I can think of is to write it by hand – but this would be tedious, because the package in question has many dependencies of its own. Besides, this defeats the point of the package manager.
When deploying Ruby apps to Heroku, Bundler makes this easy. In my Gemfile I write
gem "pg", :group => :production
gem "sqlite3", :group => :development
The command bundle install then writes a frozen version list Gemfile.lock (analogous to requirements.txt). It doesn’t install the packages listed under the ‘production’ group, but it still freezes a consistent list of versioned packages.
Example: Gemfile and Gemfile.lock
It’s not possible. Issue reported to pip https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/747