Thursday 23 July 2015

Virtualenv and library fun

Doing python development means using virtualenv, which is wonderful.  Still, sometimes you find a gotcha that trips you up.

Today, for whatever reason, inside a venv inside a brand new Ubuntu 14.04 install,  I could not see a system-wide install of pywsman (installed via sudo apt-get install python-openwsman)

For example:
mrda@host:~$ python -c 'import pywsman'
# Works

mrda@host:~$ tox -evenv --notest
(venv)mrda@host:~$ python -c 'import pywsman'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named pywsman
# WAT?

Let's try something else that's installed system-wide
(venv)mrda@host:~$ python -c 'import six'
# Works

Why does six work, and pywsman not?
(venv)mrda@host:~$ ls -la /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/six*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1418 Mar 26 22:57 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/six-1.5.2.egg-info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22857 Jan  6  2014 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/six.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22317 Jul 23 07:23 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/six.pyc
(venv)mrda@host:~$ ls -la /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/*pywsman*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  80590 Jun 16  2014 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pywsman.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 293680 Jun 16  2014 /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/_pywsman.so

The only thing that comes to mind is that pywsman wraps a .so

A work-around is to tell venv that it should use the system-wide install of pywsman, like this:

# Kill the old venv first
(venv)mrda@host:~$ deactivate
mrda@host:~$ rm -rf .tox/venv

Now startover
mrda@host:~$ tox -evenv --notest --sitepackages pywsman
(venv)mrda@host:~$ python -c "import pywsman"
# Fun and Profit!


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