beipack

beipack is a collection of utilities to assist with packaging and launching Python programs in unusual ways.

The motivating force behind this project is the desire to execute a complex multi-module Python program — specifically, Cockpit — on a computer where it's not installed. beipack is being developed as a freestanding project in hopes that it might be helpful to others.

Some key goals:

• ability to package large multi-file or multi-module Python programs into a single standard Python file (beipack)
• ability to send and execute this file via the stdin of the Python interpreter in another environment, via ssh, flatpak-spawn, or other container tools (beiboot)
• scripts compatible with the Python REPL, which allows injecting them to python -i, without sending EOF, allowing stdin to be used by the script, after it has been sent
• self-replicating ability: the target script should have access to its own source code, so that it can send itself on to further invocations
• no requirement for any ability to write to disk (and no temporary files) but an optional ability to cache the sent program in ~/.cache/ to avoid the need to send large files over slow connections on future invocations
• support for compressing Python programs to reduce the amount of data to be sent over slow connections

The intent is to develop the above features in a way that's as modular as possible, to allow mix-and-match of the required functionalities.

Current status

• beipack exists
• beiboot exists in a very simple form

Example

Build a beipack from a wheel:

beipack --main cockpit.bridge:main --zip cockpit-0-py3-none-any.whl > cockpit.beipack.py

Execute it on a remote system:

beiboot cockpit.beipack.py ssh remotehost