Portable Xcopy-able Venvs

How would this feature be useful?

• Ability to attach docker volumes (dir paths) directly to a running or “stock” docker image.
• Ability to archive, ship, and reuse/restore virtual environment directories across environments.
• Ability to dynamically compose complex environments from static/precompiled pipx package archives.

Describe the solution you’d like

If don’t know if there would be technical blockers for this, but the idea would be:

On Machine A:

pipx install my-tool
pipx export my-tool ./my-tool.tar.gz

On Machine B:

pipx import ./my-tool.tar.gz

And similarly, when attached to a docker container:

myhost$ unzip ./my-tool.tar.gz ./my-tool
myhost$ docker run --it -v ./my-tool:/pipx/portable/my-tool pipx:py3.8
docker$ pipx load-from /pipx/portable
docker$ my-tool --version

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

From within a Dockerfile, you can copy directories across composite images, but I have not fully tested this and I don’t have a universal/portable way to ensure shims are properly installed/updated when copying from one image/machine to another.

Challenges anticipated:

1. Shims won’t get copied over with the virtual env directory - they’d probably need to be re-initialized/refreshed by an explicit pipx command.
2. There may be limitations in portability based on (1) the version of python and (2) the platform and version of the host OS.

I think even if we mandate same python version and same core OS platform, this could have very high value in making compatible docker images composable.

[uranusjr]

I don’t have much experience to pex, but zipapp is a very established mechanism that is known to work (pip internally uses it as well). Shiv is a similar tool built on zipapp.

There are some gochas to zipapp if a module is poorly implemented. Those issues are fortunately increasingly rare, and you can always patch them when necessary (since the zipapp veondors all the libraries by definition anyway). I would highly encourage you trying it out.

[aaronsteers]

Thanks, @uranusjr! I’ll check it out! 😄