setuptools and pip: choice of minimal and complete install

Question

We\'ve made a library which depends on other libraries. But there are necessary (e.g. for server batch processing) and optional dependencies (e.g. for clients with GUI).

Answer 1

You can install the packages in extras_require by appending the name of the recommended dependency in square brackets (i.e. [mpl] or [bn] in your case) to the package name in pip.

So to install 'mylib' with the additional requirements, you would call pip like this:

pip install 'mylib[mpl]'
pip install 'mylib[bn]'

This will first download and install the extra dependencies, and then mylib's core dependencies.

This is anologous to how you declare those dependencies with setuptools: http://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/setuptools.html#declaring-extras-optional-features-with-their-own-dependencies (see the install_requires value in the third example)