Question

So I’m making a Flask app, and I am managing Flask and some of the necessary plugins using pip and requirements.txt. However, my app also uses a couple of jQuery and JS projects from Github as well.

It would be very simple to deal with them in the same way as other Python packages – to list their git URL in requirements.txt and to clone that repository at a given tag. Of course, the issue is that these non-python projects don’t have a setup.py file.

Is it possible to configure pip to simply clone these repos into a specific path even if there is no setup.py? Or do you have another recommended way of dealing with this?

Answer 1

No, you cannot use pip to install anything but python distributions.

Use another installation tool; buildout can manage both Python distributions and other installation tasks with python extensions called recipes.

Alternatively, you could package up your jQuery dependency as a python distribution, but such a distribution would be very tightly bound to your application. The Plone community does do this, but they include configuration for the Plone CMS to integrate the libraries into their registries; see plone.app.jquery for example, the contents of the package include more than just jQuery.