pypicache: roll your own python package index

The main script provides a relatively painless way to convert a single directory of python packages into an easy_install compatible package archive. A typical use would be to expose the contents of your PYTHON_EGG_CACHE directory, or your zc.buildout download_cache, to other people or computers on your local area network.

The tool does the following:

• Generates a minimal html page for each (normative) project/version combination.
• Generates a minimal master index page.
• Generates a mod_rewrite compatible txt: map file which maps project URIs to the appropriate page. The map contains as many variants as it needs, in order to deal with case sensitivity, safe_name() or published name. The version is forced to lower case when the project pages (above) are generated. For references that don't include a version path, the map refers to the most recent distribution that is available in the archive directory.
• Generates a fully functional set of apache configuration files that can be directly included into the server configuration (server/vhost, per-directory) and a .htaccess file that repeats the per-directory config. Depending on whether or not htaccess support is enabled at the time the index is built the necessary directives in ALL configuration contexts are either enabled or present but commented out.

There is limited - simple %()s - string template support for the index and project page generation.

See `indexpackages-man`_

NOTICE:

• The indexpackages.py python module can be run independently, without being installed and without setuptools installed. When the module is run directly, eg as python indexpackages.py, if it cant import setuptools in the normal manner it will look for a setuptools egg in the archive root directory. If multiple setuptools eggs are present it sorts the filenames lexicaly and chooses the highest. If you need to pin the setuptools version place a setuptools.pth file in the archive root.

  If there is a setuptools.pth in the index root then all directories listed in that file are added to the path, via site.addsitedir, before attempting to import setuptools.

• In order to make index generation quick, the long_description meta information in packages is NOT consulted or included in the generated project pages. This means any author provided links get missed. A feature to allow deeper package introspection will follow shortly. However, the primary use case this tool is written for is:

  I want to maintain a local python package archive - for when other sources are either unavailable or in-appropriate - and I want that archive to be a valid easy_install package index.