Question

I’ve developed a little script that searches through a wallpaper database online and download the wallpapers, I want to give this script to another person that isn’t exactly good with computers and I’m kinda starting with python so I don’t know how to include the “imports” of the third party modules in my program so it can be 100% portable, Is there something that can help me do this? or I will have to enter and analyse my third party modules and copy&paste the functions that I use?

Answer 1

Worse thing to do

An easy thing you can do is simply bundle the other modules in with your code. That does not mean that you should copy/paste the functions from the other modules into your code–you should definitely not do that, since you don’t know what dependencies you’ll be missing. Your directory structure might look like:

/myproject
    mycode.py
    thirdpartymodule1.py
    thirdpartymodule2.py
    thirdpartymodule3/
        <contents>

Better thing to do

The real best way to do this is include a list of dependencies (usually called requirements.txt) in your Python package that Python’s package installer, pip, could use to automatically download. Since that might be a little too complicated, you could give your friend these instructions, assuming Mac or Linux:

1. Run $ curl http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py | python. This provides you with tools you’ll need to install the package manager.
2. Run $ curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python. This installs the package manager.
3. Give your friend a list of the names of the third-party Python modules you used in your code. For purposes of this example, we’ll say you used requests, twisted, and boto.
4. Your friend should run from command line $ pip install <list of package names>. In our example, that would look like $ pip install requests twisted boto.
5. Run the Python code! The lines like import boto should then work, since your friend will have the packages installed on their computer.