Simon Willison’s Weblog

What to do when PyPI goes down. My deployment scripts tend to rely on PyPI these days (they install dependencies in to a virtualenv) which makes me distinctly uncomfortable. Jacob explains how to use the PyPI mirrors that are starting to come online, but that won’t help if the PyPI listing links to an externally hosted file which starts to 404, as happened with the python-openid package quite recently (now fixed). The comments on the post discuss workarounds, including hosting your own PyPI mirror or bundling tar.gz files of your dependencies with your project.

# 21st July 2010, 10:19 am / deployment, jacob-kaplan-moss, packaging, pip, pypi, python, setuptools, recovered

Kevin Teague explains the Python packaging ecosystem. The distinction between setuptools, PyPI, distutils, eggs, easy_install, pkg_resources and zc.buildout used to make my head spin. Kevin Teague’s outstanding explanation made it all make sense.

# 15th September 2008, 2:06 pm / pypi, python, distutils, eggs, setuptools, easyinstall, buildout, kevin-teague, django