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SaltStack and multiple pip requirements files

Say you have requirements files that are setup like this:

# /home/code/requirements/base.pip
Django==1.5.1

# /home/code/requirements/prod.pip

-r base.pip
psycopg2==2.5.1

Which is not only a very common setup, but also a best practice in the Python community.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out of the box with SaltStack. If you setup a managed virtual environment like this:

# Setup virtualenv
/home/code/virtualenv:
    virtualenv.managed:
        - distribute: True
        - runas: my_code_user
        - requirements: /home/code/src/requirements/prod.pip

You get the following error:

Could not open requirements file: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/base.pip'

This happens because Salt ends up moving this file to /tmp to help with chowning the entire venv when it’s finished. To get around this issue you just need to add:

no_chown: True

to your Salt state like so:

# Setup virtualenv
/home/code/virtualenv:
    virtualenv.managed:
        - distribute: True
        - runas: my_code_user
        - requirements: /home/code/src/requirements/prod.pip
        - no_chown: True

Related GitHub issues:

Hope this helps!

Posted 04 November 2013

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Frank Wiles

Founder of REVSYS and former President of the Django Software Foundation. Expert in building, scaling and maintaining complex web applications. Want to reach out? Contact me here or use the social links below.