puffin

An experimental Python packaging tool.

Motivation

Puffin is an extremely fast (experimental) Python package resolver and installer, intended to replace pip and pip-tools (pip-compile and pip-sync).

Puffin itself is not a complete "package manager", but rather a tool for locking dependencies (similar to pip-compile) and installing them (similar to pip-sync). Puffin can be used to generate a set of locked dependencies from a requirements.txt file, and then install those locked dependencies into a virtual environment.

Puffin represents an intermediary goal in our pursuit of building a "Cargo for Python": a Python package manager that is extremely fast, reliable, and easy to use -- capable of replacing not only pip, but also pipx, pip-tools, virtualenv, tox, setuptools, and even pyenv, by way of managing the Python installation itself.

Puffin's limited scope allows us to solve many of the low-level problems that are required to build such a package manager (like package installation) while shipping an immediately useful tool with a minimal barrier to adoption. Try it today in lieu of pip and pip-tools.

Features

• Extremely fast dependency resolution and installation: install dependencies in sub-second time.
• Disk-space efficient: Puffin uses a global cache to deduplicate dependencies, and uses Copy-on-Write on supported filesystems to reduce disk usage.

Limitations

Puffin does not yet support:

• Source distributions
• VCS dependencies
• URL dependencies
• Windows
• ...

Like pip-compile, Puffin generates a platform-specific requirements.txt file (unlike, e.g., poetry, which generates a platform-agnostic poetry.lock file). As such, Puffin's requirements.txt files are not portable across platforms and Python versions.

Usage

To resolve a requirements.in file:

cargo run -p puffin-cli -- pip-compile requirements.in

To install from a resolved requirements.txt file:

cargo run -p puffin-cli -- pip-sync requirements.txt

For more, see cargo run -p puffin-cli -- --help:

Usage: puffin-cli <COMMAND>

Commands:
  compile  Compile a `requirements.in` file to a `requirements.txt` file
  sync     Sync dependencies from a `requirements.txt` file
  clean    Clear the cache
  freeze   Enumerate the installed packages in the current environment
  help     Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

License

Puffin is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Puffin by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dually licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.