pypiprivate

pypiprivate is a command line tool for hosting a private PyPI-like package index or in other words, a manual python repository backed by a file based storage.

It's implemented in a way that the storage backends are pluggable. At present, only AWS S3 and local file system are supported but more implementations can be added in future.

The backend can be protected behind a HTTP reverse proxy (eg. Nginx) to allow secure private access to the packages.

How it works?

Update: We have published a blog post that explains the usage, approach and rationale in detail - Private Python Package Index with Zero Hassle.

At present pypiprivate comes with only one command to publish a package (more utilities for package search and discoverability are coming soon).

A publish operation involves,

1. Copying all the available package artifacts for a specific version under the ./dist directory to the storage backend
2. Creating the index on the same storage backend

The file structure created on the backend conforms to the "Simple Repository API" specification defined in PEP 503.

The files can now be served securely by a webserver eg. by setting up a Nginx reverse proxy.

It's important to note that although the name of the project is pypiprivate, it's upto you to ensure that the access to both, the storage and the index is really private. If you are using S3 and Nginx, for example, then

• package authors/owners will need read-write S3 creds to publish packages
• nginx will authenticate with S3 using read-only S3 creds and protect the files via HTTP Basic authentication
• package users will need HTTP Auth creds to install the packages using pip

Installation

pypi-private can be installed using pip as follows,

$ pip install pypiprivate

After installation, a script pypi-private which will be available at PATH.

You may choose to install it in a virtualenv, but it's recommended to install it globally for all users (using sudo) so that it's less confusing to build and publish projects that need to use their own virtualenvs.

Configuration

pypiprivate requires it's own config file, the default location for which is ~/.pypi-private.cfg. This repo contains the example config file example.pypi-private.cfg, which can be simply copied to the home directory and renamed to .pypi-private.cfg.

For aws-s3 type of storage backend, two environment variables PP_S3_ACCESS_KEY and PP_S3_SECRET_KEY are required to be set besides the config. The advantage of excluding s3 credentials in config file are that (1) they are not stored in plain text and, (2) it's easier to switch between read-only/read-write keys

Usage

First create the builds,

$ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

Then to publish the built artifacts run,

$ pypi-private -v publish <pkg-name> <pkg-version>

For other options, run

$ pypi-private -h

Fetching packages published using pypiprivate

Run pip with the --extra-index-url option,

$ pip install mypackage --extra-index-url=https://<user>:<password>@my.private.pypi.com/simple

Or, add the extra-index-url to pip config file at ~/.pip/pip.conf as follows

[install]
extra-index-url = https://<user>:<password>@my.private.pypi.com/simple

And then simply run,

$ pip install mypackage

License

MIT (See LICENSE)