Revision 69 as of 2012-11-30 09:18:46

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This page documents the development of the Python Package Index (formerly known as Cheeseshop):

More about PyPI

CheeseShop page has all information not directly related to PyPI development.

Developing the Package Index

PyPI architecture and endpoints

PyPI is a WSGI application that can be executed standalone using python pypi.wsgi command if all requirements are met. pypi.wsgi contains usual WSGI wrapper code and delegates request processing to WebUI.run() method from webui.py. This method just opens DB and handles exceptions, actual request processing is done in WebUI.inner_run(). This method analyzes URL endpoint and executes appropriate handler. As of 2011-04, the rules to match endpoints to handlers are the following:

/simple

WebUI.run_simple()

dump all package names on single html page

/simple/(.+)/

WebUI.run_simple()

dump all links for a package in html list

/serversig/(.+)/

.run_simple_sign()

save as above, but signed by server

/mirrors

.mirrors()

display static page with a list of mirrors

/daytime

.daytime()

display current server time

...

XML-RPC requests are detected by CONTENT_TYPE=text/xml variable in CGI environment and processed by rpc.RequestHandler().__call__(). List of XML-RPC "endpoints" is available on PyPiXmlRpc page.

Testing Your Stuff Against PyPI

If you need to test stuff against PyPI (registration, uploading, API activities) then please use the alternative server "testpypi.python.org".

TO-DO list

Something that's been requested, but needs much more thought and analysis to see whether it causes any problems: the ability to treat project names and versions as case-insensitive, while removing extraneous characters (as in pkg_resources.safe_name()) for purposes both of searching and determining name uniqueness when registering.

Done

Not Going TO-DO

Proposals

Development Environment Hints

PyPI uses postgresql 8.3 as a database, with a roll it yourself web framework based on different python modules. It uses apache2 as the web server.

It can run using wsgi, cgi, fcgi and mod_python.

Before restoring database, "pypi" role must exists:

  createuser pypi

These are notes so we can remember how to dump / restore the packages database:

  pg_dump -Fc -b packages >packages-20060706.dump
  createdb packages
  pg_restore -O -d packages -Fc packages-20060706.dump

Ask RichardJones if you need a database dump. Note that dumps should not be imported into an existing database that has had the pkdump_schema.sql DDL script run against it. The pg_dump file will create all of the database tables, columns, indexes, foreign keys, etc. that are required.

PageTemplates are obtained from:

  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.pagetemplate/trunk zope.pagetemplate
  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.tal/trunk zope.tal
  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.interface/trunk zope.interface
  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.i18nmessageid/trunk zope.i18nmessageid
  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.tales/trunk zope.tales

We also need to install ez_setup, celementtree, docutils, psycopg2, and M2Crypto.

# For debian, this should get you most of the dependencies. apt-get install zope3 python-celementtree python-psycopg

Then go ahead and edit pypi.ini and this line in pypi.cgi:

  cfg = config.Config('/tmp/pypi.ini', 'webui')

if your config.ini isn't in /tmp/pypi.ini. You can leave it as 'config.ini' if it's in the same directory as pypi.py.

You will need to add cheesecake_password=yourpasshere into the config.ini in the webui section.

To integrate it with Apache, we recommend to use WSGI through mod_wsgi. Your configuration should look like this:

   WSGIDaemonProcess pypi display-name=wsgi-pypi python-path=/usr/lib/zope2.9/lib/python processes=4 threads=1
   WSGIProcessGroup pypi
   WSGIPassAuthorization On
   WSGIScriptAlias /pypi /data/pypi/src/pypi/pypi.wsgi
   WSGIScriptAlias /simple /data/pypi/src/pypi/pypi.wsgi


CategoryDevelopmentProcess

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