Thu 01 September 2016

Releasing new versions of your Open Source projects is a time demanding task. So in a recent, and admittedly small, project I decided to try and make it as easy as possible.

I started using pbr and Travis to automatically deploy to PyPI each time I push a git tag. This means, creating a new release is as simple as git tag 1.0.0 and git push origin --tags . Anyone with commit access can then easily and confidently roll a release.

Let's break that down a bit.

pbr

Python Build Reasonableness is a library for making packaging easier and more consistent. If you are happy to use it's conventions, which are mostly reasonable, it works very well. The project is developed under the OpenStack umbrella and used on most OpenStack project. That is how I was first introduced to it, but it works well outside of this ecosystem.

To use pbr, you need to add it to your setup.py , the project encourages using a setup.cfg, so your full setup.py should look like this.

#!/usr/bin/env python from setuptools import setup setup ( setup_requires = [ 'pbr>=1.9' , 'setuptools>=17.1' ], pbr = True , )

For retrace I had to make a few extra additions because it is packaging up a single file, rather than a directory. After you have done this, much of the familiar details from a setup.py are added to a setup.cfg. This is most of the retrace setup.cfg.

[metadata] name = retrace author = Dougal Matthews author-email = dougal@dougalmatthews.com summary = Configurable retrying. description-file = README.rst home-page = https://github.com/d0ugal/retrace classifier = Intended Audience :: Developers' Natural Language :: English' Programming Language :: Python' Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7' Programming Language :: Python :: 3.4' Programming Language :: Python :: 3.5' [files] packages = retrace [wheel] universal = 1

One of the really useful features in pbr is that it automatically versions your projects. It uses git tags for this, so if you tag something 1.0.0, then the version published to PyPI etc. will be 1.0.0 . Then if you do some commits (lets say 5) and pip install then you will install 1.0.0.dev5 . Tagging a 1.0.1 then versions your bug fix release and resets the dev counter.

It's really simple and removed the need to manually bump versions, which is one of the manual steps that can easily be messed up.

Travis

Hopefully most people know Travis, it is CI-aaS, Continuous Integration as a Service. They have built a really great product which they make free for Open Source projects.

The most common Travis use case is probably for running tests and code linting, which are both fantastic reasons, but there are compelling reasons to have Travis automatically do deploys. Running the deploy on different local machines increases the chances of picking up something that wasn't committed to git. If you do this on a CI server, the deploy should always be done from a clean and consistent environment.

This is most of the retrace .travis.yml config file, trimmed down a little to keep it short, but it should be functional. The deploy block is the most interesting section.

language : python python : '3.5' env : - TOXENV=py35 - TOXENV=flake8 - TOXENV=docs install : - pip install tox script : - tox deploy : provider : pypi user : d0ugal-deploy distributions : sdist bdist_wheel password : secure : b4f6y1xw5B/RXXnOu6JIaNcgOBZ0/CkNaMeEXsoQSewYZNwobLPYA on : tags : true repo : d0ugal/retrace condition : "$TOXENV = py35"

First we specify the provider as PyPI, then the PyPI user is set. We specify both source and wheel distributions. The password is encrypted and added with travis encrypt --add deploy.password and then some conditions are set. We only want to deploy tags, the source repository and for a specific TOXENV (otherwise the deploy will be attempted for each env).

Travis will then use twine to upload to PyPI, which uses HTTPS, even on older Python versions.

Updating documentation

As a bonus, this is a nice extra touch with Travis. You can easily have your documentation automatically built and published. In retrace the documentation is a small MkDocs project. With the following in your Travis config you can easily publish your documentation on every commit.

after_success : - git config user.name "Dougal Matthews"; - git config user.email "dougal@dougalmatthews.com"; - git remote add gh-token "https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/d0ugal/retrace.git"; - git fetch gh-token && git fetch gh-token gh-pages:gh-pages; - pip install -IU -r test-requirements.txt .; - mkdocs gh-deploy -v --clean --remote-name gh-token;

You may want to move this to only happen on a deploy, but for a small project like retrace there is typically a release after any changes that would require docs updates.

Overall, I am very happy about how this came out. I would like to roll out a similar strategy to other projects that I maintain. The change isn't earth shatteringly huge, but it certainly greases the wheels a bit and makes things easier.