Specifying dependencies that aren’t in PyPI via dependency_links

Warning

Dependency links support has been dropped by pip starting with version 19.0 (released 2019-01-22).

If your project depends on packages that don’t exist on PyPI, you may still be able to depend on them if they are available for download as:

• an egg, in the standard distutils sdist format,

• a single .py file, or

• a VCS repository (Subversion, Mercurial, or Git).

You need to add some URLs to the dependency_links argument to setup().

The URLs must be either:

1. direct download URLs,

2. the URLs of web pages that contain direct download links, or

3. the repository’s URL

In general, it’s better to link to web pages, because it is usually less complex to update a web page than to release a new version of your project. You can also use a SourceForge showfiles.php link in the case where a package you depend on is distributed via SourceForge.

If you depend on a package that’s distributed as a single .py file, you must include an "#egg=project-version" suffix to the URL, to give a project name and version number. (Be sure to escape any dashes in the name or version by replacing them with underscores.) EasyInstall will recognize this suffix and automatically create a trivial setup.py to wrap the single .py file as an egg.

In the case of a VCS checkout, you should also append #egg=project-version in order to identify for what package that checkout should be used. You can append @REV to the URL’s path (before the fragment) to specify a revision. Additionally, you can also force the VCS being used by prepending the URL with a certain prefix. Currently available are:

• svn+URL for Subversion,

• git+URL for Git, and

• hg+URL for Mercurial

A more complete example would be:

vcs+proto://host/path@revision#egg=project-version

Be careful with the version. It should match the one inside the project files. If you want to disregard the version, you have to omit it both in the requires and in the URL’s fragment.

This will do a checkout (or a clone, in Git and Mercurial parlance) to a temporary folder and run setup.py bdist_egg.

The dependency_links option takes the form of a list of URL strings. For example, this will cause a search of the specified page for eggs or source distributions, if the package’s dependencies aren’t already installed:

setup.cfg

[options]
#...
dependency_links = http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/

setup.py

setup(
    ...,
    dependency_links=[
        "http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/",
    ],
)