Using pip for development

Warning

This guide is not complete and not recommended. You can just skip this page. There are some problems when using pip and conda at the same time which may lead to breaking all your conda environments. You can look at the conda develop command for an alternative.

Since all Bob packages are distributed with Setuptools, you can easily develop them using pip. Additionally, you can use conda to create separate isolated environments for your different tasks.

Note

Keep this in mind: 1 task, 1 environment. Do not mix.

Note

This guide does not aim to duplicate the pip’s user guide. Please go through that first to make sure you are confident in using pip before continuing here.

Developing a Bob package with pip can be as easy as running the following command while your current directory is the source of the package that you want to develop:

pip install -e .

This will install the current package in your Python environment in an editable mode. You can keep changing this package at its source directory and your changes will be immediately reflected in your environment.

Warning

If you modify the contents of setup.py such as adding or removing console script entry points, you need to run pip install -e . again.

Developing a C++ Package

While developing a C++ package, the same pip install -e . command can be used to compile the package again. Also, you may want to export some debugging flags if you want to debug the current package:

export CFLAGS=$CFLAGS -O0 -g -DBOB_DEBUG -DBZ_DEBUG
export CXXFLAGS=$CXXFLAGS -O0 -g -DBOB_DEBUG -DBZ_DEBUG
pip install -e .

Developing Several Packages from Source

Often it is required not only to develop the current package but also to develop several dependencies from source too. To do so, you can create a requirements file (usually named requirements.txt) and run the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

while the content of your requirements.txt file lists the packages that the current package both depends on and the dependencies that you want to develop. For example, the following requirements.txt file can be used to develop bob.io.image, together with all of its direct and indirect dependencies:

setuptools
-egit+https://gitlab.idiap.ch/bob/bob.extension.git#egg=bob.extension
-egit+https://gitlab.idiap.ch/bob/bob.blitz.git#egg=bob.blitz
-egit+https://gitlab.idiap.ch/bob/bob.core.git#egg=bob.core
-egit+https://gitlab.idiap.ch/bob/bob.io.base.git#egg=bob.io.base
matplotlib

However because of a limitation of pip, you need to install the Bob dependencies that contain C++ code both in order and one by one. This means that pip install -r requirements.txt will not work in this case. Instead, you can run the following command:

tr '\n' '\0' < requirements.txt | xargs -0 -n 1 pip install

Warning

For the tr '\n' '\0' < requirements.txt | xargs -0 -n 1 pip install command to work, you should not have any spaces in your requirements.txt file (notice that -egit+https://... has no spaces) and your Bob dependencies should be listed in their order of dependencies.