Motivation & Comparisons

Why?

At LinkedIn we ship hundreds of command line utilities to every machine in our data-centers and all of our employees workstations. The vast majority of these utilties are written in Python. In addition to these utilities we also have many internal libraries that are uprev’d daily.

Because of differences in iteration rate and the inherent problems present when dealing with such a huge dependency graph, we need to package the executables discretely. Initially we took advantage of the great open source tool PEX. PEX elegantly solved the isolated packaging requirement we had by including all of a tool’s dependencies inside of a single binary file that we could then distribute!

However, as our tools matured and picked up additional dependencies, we became acutely aware of the performance issues being imposed on us by pkg_resources’s Issue 510. Since PEX leans heavily on pkg_resources to bootstrap it’s environment, we found ourselves at an impass: lose out on the ability to neatly package our tools in favor of invocation speed, or impose a few second performance penalty for the benefit of easy packaging.

After spending some time investigating extricating pkg_resources from PEX, we decided to start from a clean slate and thus shiv was created.

How?

Shiv exploits the same features of Python as PEX, packing __main__.py into a zipfile with a shebang prepended (akin to zipapps, as defined by PEP 441, extracting a dependency directory and injecting said dependencies at runtime. We have to credit the great work by @wickman, @kwlzn, @jsirois and the other PEX contributors for laying the groundwork!

The primary differences between PEX and shiv are:

• shiv completey avoids the use of pkg_resources. If it is included by a transitive dependency, the performance implications are mitigated by limiting the length of sys.path and always including the -s and -E Python interpreter flags.
• Instead of shipping our binary with downloaded wheels inside, we package an entire site-packages directory, as installed by pip. We then bootstrap that directory post-extraction via the stdlib’s site.addsitedir function. That way, everything works out of the box: namespace packages, real filesystem access, etc.

Because we optimize for a shorter sys.path and don’t include pkg_resources in the critical path, executales created with shiv can outperform ones created with PEX by almost 2x. In most cases the executables created with shiv are even faster than running a script from within a virtualenv!