Proper Python

 2022-09-24 -  ~3 Minutes

What follows is the README.md file from my GitHub repo where https://blog.summittdweller.com   is built. It outlines how to “properly” add Python to a project such that we can create an easily reproducible “virtual environment” without storing the necessary Python libraries in GitHub.

From the README.md…

blogs-SummittDweller

The Python portions of this repo were gleaned from https://github.com/SummittDweller/hikes   . This was the repo for my https://blog.SummittDweller.com/   static website before I moved the blog to Ghost in 2023.

Latest Python Improvements

Using guidance at https://predictivehacks.com/how-to-work-with-vs-code-and-virtual-environments-in-python/   I successfully created a new .venv virtual environment. The commands I used to do this were…

╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummittDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ python3 -m venv .venv

╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummittDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ source .venv/bin/activate

Now the .venv is engaged and ready for some code so I added my Python code and turned my attention to each of the import statements within.  Most of these import statements will require the installation of a module or package.  For example, statements like import frontmatter and from datetime import datetime suggested that I needed to install the following:

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummittDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ pip3 install python-frontmatter

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummitDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ pip3 install datetime

Now, in order to “freeze” a copy of this module/package configuration to use later…  

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummittDweller ‹main› 
╰─$ pip3 freeze > python-requirements.txt

Whenever I want to re-install all of the modules/packages captured by the “freeze” command I do this:

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummittDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ pip3 install -r python-requirements.txt

To finish my setup in VSCode I used COMMAND-SHIFT-P to select and Python: Select interpreter to choose the new .venv Python.  After that…

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummitDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ python3 consolidate.py --start 20220806 --end 20220825

(.venv) ╭─mark@Marks-Mac-Mini ~/GitHub/blogs-SummitDweller ‹main*›
╰─$ hugo server

Rebuilding a Local Environment

Based on guideance from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6590688/is-it-bad-to-have-my-virtualenv-directory-inside-my-git-repository   I’ve reconstructed this project such that Python artifacts do NOT propogate into Github.

The project should automatically “rebuild” as necessary when opened in VSCode, but if the Python virtual environment needs to be recreated use…

source .venv/bin/activate && pip3 install -r python-requirements.txt

Deployment via DigitalOcean

In order to deploy this starter static app on DigitalOcean I had to PERMANENTLY move all of my Python components (.py scripts and requirements.txt) to a .python directory to hide it from view during app creation. Before moving these elements DigitalOcean would consistently try to deploy my app as Python, and that’s not right.

See DigitalOcean ticket [#06849069] Hugo static site with Python components builds fail for details.

The response I received from DigitalOcean…

Hello,

Thanks for contacting DigitalOcean.

We appreciate you reaching out to us about your Hugo static site. From what you mentioned it does sound like your app is getting detected as a python webservice rather then a static site due to the requirements.txt file you had in the root of your repo.

Unfortunately this is currently what App platform uses to detect applications as python apps. Either having a requirements.txt file or a setup.py file will cause that detection. Our engineers are looking into options to specify the build pack used rather then relying upon the auto detection, which would address this issue in your case, but don’t have a timeline yet for implementing it.

In the mean time the work around that you have specified here should work fine for this. It should cause the app to be detected as a static site rather then python. Hopefully it isn’t impacting anything else in your app’s build process.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Regards, Nate Senior Cloud Support Engineer Check out our community for great tutorials, articles and FAQs! digitalocean.com/community

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Remedy

Based on the response above I’m making final changes to eliminate the .python folder, renaming .python/requirements.txt as python-requirements.txt, and pulling all other contents of .python into the root of the project.