virtual-node

Continuous integration status:

This package is a wrapper around the node.js sources and provides a convenient way to install it directly into your virtualenv instead of globally. I created this package to play around with a simple installation for Django projects that use django-compressor's precompiler to generate CSS from less files.

The install routine used in setup.py is adapted from the nodeenv package provided by Eugene Kalinin. The difference is that I want to install node.js into an existing virtualenv instead of creating a specific environment for node.

I am using this in combination with virtual-less which installs the lessc commandline tool into a virtual environment.

Installation

Warning

This will download the node.js sources and compile it into your virtualenv. Make sure that you have all required build dependencies for node.js installed before installing virtual-node. The installation will take quite a long time to run for the first time around, so have a coffee or a beer handy.

Installing the node into your virtual environment is as easy as:

$ pip install virtual-node

If you had node.js installed globally previous to installing virtual-node, running npm or node will still point to your global installation. To make sure you're using the newly installed node, deactivate your virtualenv and re-activate it.

You can check that virtual-node has node pointing to the right place by running which node in your virtual environment:

$ which node

Your output should look something like:

/home/elbaschid/.virtualenvs/lessc-test/bin/node

Note

virtual-node is explicitly meant to be installed into a virtualenv and not into your global environment. This has not been tested and will most likely not work or cause problems. Only try it if you know what you are doing.

Install specific version of node

Starting with version 0.0.3 it is possible to specify the version of node using the NPM packaging format package.json. To use this feature you need to specify the current project directory in the environment variable PROJECT_DIR before you install virtual-node. You can simply export it on the commandline:

$ export PROJECT_DIR=/path/to/my/project

or define it in your virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper scripts.

During installation, the setup script will attempt to retrieve the desired version of node from a file named package.json which is also used by NPM [and is explained in detail on their website](https://npmjs.org/doc/json.html).

A sample file to specify version 0.10.0 would look like this:

{
  "name": "my-project",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "engines": {
    "node": "==0.10.0"
  }
}

The version of the engine to be used is the version that virtual-node will use to install node. Note: you have to specify an exact version (using ==) otherwise the version will be ignored.

Issues & Contributions

Please let me know if you have any issues, please raise an issue here on the github project.

If you want to contribute, fork this repository and open a pull request with your changes. I'd be happy to include them.

License

This package is released under the permissive New BSD license.