Platter is a tool for Python that simplifies deployments on Unix servers. It’s a thin wrapper around pip, virtualenv and wheel and aids in creating packages that can install without compiling or downloading on servers.

Why would you want to use it?

fastest way to build and distribute Python packages in an ecosystem you control. With the built-in caching we have seen build time improvements from 400 seconds down to 20 seconds for releases with no version changes on dependencies.

no need to compile or download anything on the destination servers you distribute your packages to. Everything (with the exception of the interpreter itself) comes perfectly bundled up.

100% control over your dependencies. No accidental version mismatches on your servers (this includes system dependencies like setuptools, pip and virtualenv).

You can get the tool directly from PyPI:

$ pip install platter

To create a platter distribution all you need is this:

$ platter build /path/to/your/python/package

Once this finishes, it will have created a tarball of the fully built Python package together will all dependencies and an installation script. You can then take this package and push it to as many servers as you want and install it: