Include python module (dependencies) installation in your python script

Question

Is there a way to include/invoke python module(s) (dependencies) installation first, before running the actual/main script?

For example, in my main.py:

Answer 1

There's a few ways to do this. One way is to surround the import statement with a try...except ImportError block and then have some Python code that installs the package if the ImportError exception is raised, so something like:

try:
    import MultipartPostHandler
except ImportError:
    # code that installs MultipartPostHandler and then imports it

I don't think this approach is very clean. Plus if there are other unrelated importing issues, that won't be detected here. A better approach might be to have a bash script that checks to see if the module is installed:

pip freeze | grep MultipartPostHandler

and if not, installs the module:

pip install MultipartPostHandler

Then we can safely run the original Python code.

EDIT: Actually, I like FLORET's answer better. The imp module is exactly what you want.