wi, the wheel installer

This is a package installer for Python wheel packages. For more information about wheels, please refer to https://pythonwheels.com/

Besides making the package installation process much faster, wheels allow you to get rid of a building env on your servers, tools such as compilers and dev libraries will not be required anymore if all of your dependencies has wheel packages available.

Speaking of packages available, this tool is an attempt to motivate authors of libs, frameworks and tools to release their packages in the wheel format.

Please note that this tool isn't a replacement for pip. If you have deps that don't have wheels package available, you will still have to use pip.

However, this tool makes it easy to fallback to pip when the wheel packages are not found.

No idle time

This tool is based on asyncio, in such a way that while packages are being downloaded, the tool will perform the installation of packages already downloaded.

Installation

$ pip install wi

Usage

If your packages are listed in a requirements.txt file, you can just run:

$ wi

If the packages are on a file other than requirements.txt, then you should specify the file path as the sole argument to the command. For example:

$ wi requirements-staging.txt

The command above will search for wheel packages for every entry in the file. In case no package is found, the command will output to stdout the package name and version, in the format package==version, meaning you can redirect the stdout to pip as a fallback for installing the missing packages:

$ wi | xargs pip install --no-deps

Demonstration

(wi) root@personal:~# pip uninstall -y -r requirements.txt &>/dev/null
(wi) root@personal:~# time pip install --no-cache-dir --no-deps \
   -r requirements.txt &>/dev/null

real	0m46.714s
user	0m40.575s
sys	0m3.077s
(wi) root@personal:~# pip uninstall -y -r requirements.txt &>/dev/null
(wi) root@personal:~# time wi &>/dev/null

real	0m2.315s
user	0m1.680s
sys	0m0.404s

Contributions

Contributions are welcome. Given this is just the start, the tool is missing lots of cool stuff. If you have time and are willing to contribute, just open a ticket and let's discuss it there!

It is also important to share this tool so we can advance with the current status os python wheels and pip itself.

Running tests

Minimal tests are present runing tox

$ pip install tox
$ tox