Installing Python egg dependencies without apt-get

Question

I've got a Python module which is distributed on PyPI, and therefore installable using easy_install. It depends on lxml, which in turn depends on libxslt1-dev. I'm unable to install libxslt1-dev with easy_install, so it doesn't work to put it in install_requires. Is there any way I can get setuptools to install it instead of resorting to apt-get?

Answer 1

It's better use apt-get to install lxml (or the python packages that has c extensions) and then pull pure python package from pypi. Also I generally try to avoid using easy_install for top level install, I rather create a virtual env using virtualenv and then use easy_install created by virtualenv to keep my setups clean.

This strategy is working successfully for me for couple of production environments.

Answer 2

setuptools can only install Python packages that in the package index you are using, either the default index of the one you specify with easy_install -i http://myindex.site/index.

Any non-Python dependencies have to be installed using the standard installation package for the platform (apt-get on Debian based Linux distros). libxml2 and libxslt fall into this category so you should install these in the standard way.