Piper

A software manager for easy development and distribution of Python code.

The main features that Piper adds to Python are:

• Support for large-scale, multi-package projects
• Reproducibility (clear, transparent dependency management)
• Robust development-lifecycle, from blueprinting to distribution

Piper is inspired by what Maven is for Java and uses Pip and Virtual Environments.

Why Piper

Python is great in many things, particularly for scripting. But it is powerful enough to create complex software too. Still, when doing so, it lacks some robustness and quickness.

Instead:

• Piper lets you forget about repetitive setup of Python projects, with creation of Virtual Environments, issues with imports, PYTHONPATH, folder structures. It does all of this for you.

• Piper ensures that when you run a Python script, all its requirements are implicitly installed. Along with reproducibility, this makes room for easy collaboration between developers.

• Also, while with standard tools it's hard to have multiple packages, one requiring the other, with Piper is a matter of few YAML files. You can split your project in several packages instead of having tons of requirements, code replication and/or single package-monoliths.

All in all, Piper lets you design proper structure and modularity for your code. No worries about imports and low-level stuff.

Example of Piper Project

You can find an example of Piper project here.

Installation

With Python >= 3.7, simply run

pip install piper-tools

From now on, you can use piper from command line.

Basic Usage

Once you have defined your structure of Pipes (submodules of your project), for instance like in the example or like this

complexproject/
    common/
        package/
        pipe.yml
    microservices/
        first/
            package/
            pipe.yml
        second/
            package/
            pipe.yml
        pipe.yml
    pipe.yml

you can run

piper setup

in the main folder, where the first pipe.yml file is located.

This will:

• Understand the dependencies
• Create the Virtual Environments
• Install the requirements
• Install the packages themselves in development mode (so that you can import them in their Virtual Environments)

You can also create a distribution package with piper pack [commands], which is the equivalent of python setup.py [commands], for instance:

piper pack sdist

in the folder of the Pipe you want to pack. This will create the distribution in the ./build/package/dist folder.

In any moment, you can run

piper clean

to destroy the Virtual Environments and other build objects.