Create a Debian package that contains both the virtual environment and the Python interpreter inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why is this project useful? Because you may need to deploy a Debian package and you would like control over the Python interpreter and over your dependencies. Control equals autonomy. Autonomy is needed to getting things done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The packaging of Python applications is a world in itself. For a summary read here<\/a>: Probably the closest project to this one is dh_virtualenv<\/a> . I would like to continue using dh_virtualenv, however I would also like to add the Python interpreter inside the package, and I would like native support for UV. For example, I would like a tool that uses directly the uv.lock instead of me having to compile the uv.lock to a requirements.txt, so that it could be understood by dh_virtualenv.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, there is pyinstaller<\/a>, which actually bundles your code, virtual environment and python interpreter into a single executable. A workflow based on pyinstaller would be to create the virtual environment with uv (including the library pyinstaller), then execute pyinstaller to create the bundled binary (actually a zip file), and finally create the debian package with the bundled binary inside. The downside of Pyinstaller, Nuitka and Pyoxidizer is that despite being interesting projects, in the case of a web development app they are not very useful: There are no clear benefits of “compiling” the code (I am not exactly sure that the code is actually compiled) because the webservers (e.g uwsgi, gunicorn, etc.) work with text files. Hence, despite that there is some merit on distributing your whole app in a single binary the risk of adding an unnecessary project to your pipeline may not be worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I splitted this project in two parts. In the first, I had to learn how to insert a Python interpreter (installed via uv) inside a Debian package. The second part builds upon the first project, but in this case its not only the python interpreter, but the virtual environment and the project code. Basically we have a small fastapi app that we want to package in a debian format, with the virtual environment and the python interpret inside:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are of course similar and established projects that tackle the problem that I am trying to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
dh_virtualenv allows you to create Python debian packages with the virtual environment inside.
It was a project created by Spotify, and for a long time has been among my favorite tools.
What I like is that it works well with the setup.py, and the executables that setup.py creates –they point to the correct python interpreter (the one inside the virtual environment).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pyinstaller supports several versions of python upto 3.13. Other similar projects are Nuitka<\/a> an PyOxidizer<\/a>. These two project produce a single binary from the python project. Nuitka supports Python 3 (3.4 \u2014 3.13) and Python 2 (2.6, 2.7), while PyOxydizer only supports Python 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe solution<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
You can read that project here<\/a>:
You can clonee the first project here<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can clone the project here<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n