Python setuptools: How can I list a private repository under install_requires?

Question

I am creating a setup.py file for a project which depends on private GitHub repositories. The relevant parts of the file look like this:

from s         


        

Answer 1

I couldn't find any good documentation on this, but came across the solution mainly through trial & error. Further, installing from pip & setuptools have some subtle differences; but this way should work for both.

GitHub don't (currently, as of August 2016) offer an easy way to get the zip / tarball of private repos. So you need to point setuptools to tell setuptools that you're pointing to a git repo:

from setuptools import setup
import os
# get deploy key from https://help.github.com/articles/git-automation-with-oauth-tokens/
github_token = os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN']

setup(
    # ...
    install_requires='package',
    dependency_links = [
    'git+https://{github_token}@github.com/user/{package}.git/@{version}#egg={package}-0'
        .format(github_token=github_token, package=package, version=master)
        ] 

A couple of notes here:

• For private repos, you need to authenticate with GitHub; the simplest way I found is to create an oauth token, drop that into your environment, and then include it with the URL
• You need to include some version number (here is 0) at the end of the link, even if there's no package on PyPI. This has to be a actual number, not a word.
• You need to preface with git+ to tell setuptools it's to clone the repo, rather than pointing at a zip / tarball
• version can be a branch, a tag, or a commit hash
• You need to supply --process-dependency-links if installing from pip

Answer 2

Edit: This appears to only work with public github repositories, see comments.

dependency_links=[
    'https://github.com/my_account/private_repo_1/tarball/master#egg=private_repo_1',
    'https://github.com/my_account/private_repo_2/tarball/master#egg=private_repo_2',
],

Above syntax seems to work for me with setuptools 1.0. At the moment at least the syntax of adding "#egg=project_name-version" to VCS dependencies is documented in the link you gave to distribute documentation.