shiv đŸ”Ș¶

Shiv is a command line utility for building fully self contained Python zipapps as outlined in PEP 441 but with all their dependencies included!

Shiv’s primary goal is making distributing Python applications fast & easy.

How it works¶

Shiv includes two major components: a builder and a bootstrap module.

Building¶

In order to build self-contained single-artifact executables, shiv leverages pip and stdlib’s zipapp module.

Note

Unlike “conventional” zipapps, shiv packs a site-packages style directory of your tool’s dependencies into the resulting binary, and then at bootstrap time extracts it into a ~/.shiv cache directory. More on this in the Bootstrapping section.

shiv accepts only a few command line parameters of it’s own, and any unprocessed parameters are delegated to pip install.

For example, if you wanted to create an executable for Pipenv, you’d specify the required dependencies (pipenv and pew), the callable (either -e for a setuptools-style entry point or -c for a bare console_script name), and the output file.

$ shiv -c pipenv -o ~/bin/pipenv pipenv pew

This creates an executable (~/bin/pipenv) containing all the dependencies required by pipenv and pew that invokes the console_script pipenv when executed!

You can optionally omit the entry point specification, which will drop you into an interpreter that is bootstrapped with the dependencies you specify.

$ shiv requests -o requests.pyz --quiet
$ ./requests.pyz
Python 3.6.1 (default, Apr 19 2017, 15:02:08)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.29)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(InteractiveConsole)
>>> import requests
>>> requests.get('http://shiv.readthedocs.io/')
<Response [200]>

This is particularly useful for running scripts without needing to contaminate your Python environment, since the pyz files can be used as a shebang!

Bootstrapping¶

When you run an executable created with shiv a special bootstrap function is called. This function unpacks dependencies into a uniquely named subdirectory of ~/.shiv and then runs your entry point (or interactive interpreter) with those dependencies added to your sys.path. Once the dependencies have been extracted to disk, any further invocations will re-use the ‘cached’ site-packages unless they are deleted or moved.

Note

Dependencies are extracted (rather than loaded into memory from the zipapp itself) because of limitations of binary dependencies. Shared objects loaded via the dlopen syscall require a regular filesystem. Many libraries also expect a filesystem in order to do things like building paths via __file__, etc.

Influencing Runtime¶

There are a number of environment variables you can specify to influence a pyz file created with shiv.

SHIV_ROOT¶

This should be populated with a full path, it effectively overrides ~/.shiv as the default base dir for shiv’s extraction cache.

SHIV_INTERPRETER¶

This is a boolean that bypasses and console_script or entry point baked into your pyz. Useful for dropping into an interactive session in the environment of a built cli utility.

SHIV_ENTRY_POINT¶

This should be populated with a setuptools-style callable, e.g. “module.main:main”. This will execute the pyz with whatever callable entry point you supply. Useful for sharing a single pyz across many callable ‘scripts’.

SHIV_FORCE_EXTRACT¶

This forces re-extraction of dependencies even if they’ve already been extracted. If you make hotfixes/modifications to the ‘cached’ dependencies, this will overwrite them.

Indices and tables¶