Install Egg File in Python
- Use setuptools to Install egg File in Python
- Unzip to Install egg File in Python
Long before the pip days, packages were stored as .egg files and were installed via the setuptools component. However, since pip has been introduced to Python, .egg has been replaced by the wheel file, .whl .
If you are working with other packages, there is a possibility to face working with them; though they are deprecated, you can work around them and install the packages stored as .egg files.
In this article, we will discuss how to install the egg file in Python and the tools you can use to achieve this operation.
Use setuptools to Install egg File in Python
Eggs is a distribution format in Python previously used that contains information required by a particular project, from dependencies to environment variables.
Numerous binary formats represent eggs, but the .egg zip file format is the most popular one because it’s useful for sharing projects and simplifies the distribution of Python packages and projects. Alongside the Python code, the .egg file often contains and works with project-wide metadata, C extensions, and package-specific data.
With .egg files, you don’t need to build or install it per se; you need to add it to your sys.path , but it might often require runtime files. Like the popular Python requirement, requirements.txt and .egg files allow the libraries’ specifications to be stated within.
If you happen to need to work with a .egg file and need the non-Python data files, you need to install the .egg file. To install Python Eggs, you can make use of easy_install .
We will base all operations within the Python 2.7 environment on Windows for all the operations here to work.
To access easy_install , you need to install the setuptools package, which helps to download, install, manage, build or remove Python packages.
To install setuptools , we need to download the ez_setup.py from the setuptools package page.
After downloading the Python file, you transfer it to the Python27 directory, which would most likely be C:\Python27 . Now, open your command prompt, change the directory to C:\Python27 and set the PYTHON_PATH .
set PYTHON_PATH=c:\Python27 set Path=C:\Python27\Scripts Now, run the following command to install the setuptools package.
The easy_install.exe command is now installed and can be used to install an egg file within your Python 2.7 environment.
Because egg files are now deprecated, it can be hard to find one to show as an example, but we can still create them using the setuptools module.
In our case, we will create an empty egg file with the name delftscope . To create such, we need to create a setup.py file that contains the following code.
from setuptools import setup, find_packages setup( name = "delftscope", version = "0.1", packages = find_packages() ) Afterward, we can run the following python command, which creates the egg file alongside other directories. These directories include build , dist , and delftscope.egg-info .
Within the dist directory, you will find the egg file with the name delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg .
Now that we have an egg file to work with let’s use the easy_install program to install it. Since we have added it to the OS environment using the set command, we should be able to use easy_install anywhere.
To install the egg file in Python, you can use the following command within your PowerShell.
easy_install .\delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg Processing delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg Copying delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg to c:\python27\lib\site-packages Adding delftscope 0.1 to easy-install.pth file Installed c:\python27\lib\site-packages\delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg Processing dependencies for delftscope==0.1 Searching for delftscope==0.1 Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/delftscope/ With this, you would have installed the module packaged within the egg file. However, Python has moved to the wheel distribution format.
Unzip to Install egg File in Python
Egg files are zip files; therefore, you can unzip this file. So, if you are on Linux, you can use the unzip package to extract its content and then use the setup.py to install the package that’s held within the egg file.
To unzip the egg file, the unzip command can be used.
unzip -l delftscope-0.1-py3.10.egg Afterward, you can access the contents and run the python command to install the package.
Olorunfemi is a lover of technology and computers. In addition, I write technology and coding content for developers and hobbyists. When not working, I learn to design, among other things.
How is «egg=» used in «pip install -e»?
Trying to test editable installs out and I’m not sure how to interpret the results. I intentionally made a typo in the egg= portion but it was still able to locate the egg without any help from me:
root@6be8ee41b6c9:/# pip3 install -e git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git Could not detect requirement name for 'git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git', please specify one with #egg=your_package_name root@6be8ee41b6c9:/# pip3 install -e git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git#egg= Could not detect requirement name for 'git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git#egg=', please specify one with #egg=your_package_name root@6be8ee41b6c9:/# pip3 install -e git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git#egg=e Obtaining e from git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git#egg=e Cloning https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git to /src/e Running setup.py (path:/src/e/setup.py) egg_info for package e produced metadata for project name clientapp. Fix your #egg=e fragments. Installing collected packages: clientapp Found existing installation: ClientApp 0.7 Can't uninstall 'ClientApp'. No files were found to uninstall. Running setup.py develop for clientapp Successfully installed clientapp root@6be8ee41b6c9:/# pip3 freeze asn1crypto==0.24.0 -e git+https://gitlab.com/jame/clientapp.git@5158712c426ce74613215e61cab8c21c7064105c#egg=ClientApp cryptography==2.6.1 entrypoints==0.3 keyring==17.1.1 keyrings.alt==3.1.1 pycrypto==2.6.1 PyGObject==3.30.4 pyxdg==0.25 SecretStorage==2.3.1 six==1.12.0 So if I could mess the egg name up so bad, why is it considered an error to either leave it blank or set to something empty