beipack is a collection of utilities to assist with packaging and launching Python programs in unusual ways.
The motivating force behind this project is the desire to execute a complex multi-module Python program — specifically, Cockpit — on a computer where it's not installed. beipack is being developed as a freestanding project in hopes that it might be helpful to others.
Some key goals:
- ability to package large multi-file or multi-module Python programs into a single standard Python file (
beipack) - ability to send and execute this file via the stdin of the Python interpreter in another environment, via
ssh,flatpak-spawn, or other container tools (beiboot) - scripts compatible with the Python REPL, which allows injecting them to
python -i, without sending EOF, allowing stdin to be used by the script, after it has been sent - self-replicating ability: the target script should have access to its own source code, so that it can send itself on to further invocations
- no requirement for any ability to write to disk (and no temporary files) but an optional ability to cache the sent program in
~/.cache/to avoid the need to send large files over slow connections on future invocations - support for compressing Python programs to reduce the amount of data to be sent over slow connections
The intent is to develop the above features in a way that's as modular as possible, to allow mix-and-match of the required functionalities.
beipackexistsbeibootexists in a very simple form
Build a beipack from a wheel:
beipack --main cockpit.bridge:main --zip cockpit-0-py3-none-any.whl > cockpit.beipack.py
Execute it on a remote system:
beiboot cockpit.beipack.py ssh remotehost