Bundling binary tools in Python wheels ¶

pip install ziglang ¶

One of the options provided for installing Zig (and its bundled toolchain) is to use pip:

           % pip install ziglang
...
% python -m ziglang cc --help
OVERVIEW: clang LLVM compiler

USAGE: zig [options] file...

OPTIONS:
  -###                    Print (but do not run) the commands to run for this compilation
  --amdgpu-arch-tool=<value>
                          Tool used for detecting AMD GPU arch in the system.
...

          

This means you can now pip install a full C compiler for your current platform !

pip install a SQLite database ¶

It’s not quite the same thing, since it’s not packaging an executable, but the one project I have that fits this mould if you squint a little is my datasette-basemap plugin.

It’s a Datasette plugin which bundles a 23MB SQLite database file containing OpenStreetMap tiles for the first seven zoom levels of their world map—5,461 tile images total.

I built it so that people could use my datasette-cluster-map and datasette-leaflet-geojson entirely standalone, without needing to load tiles from a central tile server.

Warning

Update: Paul O’Leary McCann points out that PyPI has a default 60MB size limit for packages, though it can be raised on a case-by-case basis.

He wrote about this in Distributing Large Files with PyPI Packages