Python package management

[stevenwu_n]

Is there a Python package management system somewhere in the pipeline? I’m aware that I can ask Anvil to install packages, however my team develops a lot of custom Python packages that is managed with CI in Github. It is a bridge too far to ask Anvil to install all of our packages and having to wait a day for a package to be installed or patched is also too long for our usecase.

To overcome this we, currently use uplinks or copy code directly to server modules (which is not a best practice). It would help a lot if we could install and manage, for example wheel packages, under different environments.

If there is already something in the pipeline, I would love to learn more about it!

[hugetim]

I think you could use git to synchronize between GitHub and an Anvil-hosted (server-side-only) app you could then use as a dependency. Here’s how anvil-extras has automated that (if I’m understanding correctly):
anvil-extras/release.yml at main · anvilistas/anvil-extras · GitHub (the “Build and deploy” step)

[owen.campbell]

That setup is based on this show and tell post from @james.campbell :

Github Action for automatically pushing to Anvil

Here’s a ready to use Github Actions file, that will push your project up to Anvil whenever something is merged into the branch main or a new release is published. I’d recommend creating three Secrets in the Github repo for the project: one for the ssh key, one for the anvil host info, and one for the project url at anvil. The secret ANVIL_HOST should contain: [anvil.works]:2222,[52.56.203.177]:2222 ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCv1qTximy8Og3MYb8+MGqwtWBorLho9MLgC35oO9Lk445j8GagTor02u…

[stevenwu_n]

Thanks @owen.campbell @hugetim, this is very interesting! I like the concept, it might be less straightforward but it will mean that you can have one server side app that manages all your packages with CI if I understand correctly. Will play around with this and see if this works for us. Thanks again!