Quickstart

To create platter packages you need an installation of Python 2.7. Note that platter does support the creation of Python 3 packages but itself is running on 2.x only.

Platter can be installed into a virtual environment with pip:

$ virtualenv venv
$ ./venv/bin/pip install platter

It’s recommended to install platter into its own virtualenv as it has its own dependencies that might otherwise interfere with your system. However all packages build with platter are themselves created in a separate virtualenv.

Building Platter Packages

In order to create a platter package you need a setuptools based distribution. This means you need to have a setup.py file for your package. If you do not have one, consult the setuptools documentation for more information.

To then create a distribution all you need to do is to invoke platter build with the path to your package:

$ platter build /path/to/yourpackage

This will download all dependencies, compile all extension modules and pack them up. The resulting artifact will be created in a folder called dist in the current directory.

Alternatively you can also instruct platter to not create a final tarball and to instead just create a folder with all files:

$ platter build --format=dir /path/to/yourpackage

Installing Platter Packages

Once you have created such a platter package you can distribute it to different servers and install it there. Inside the tarball there is an install script install.sh which will install the platter package into a fresh and isolated virtualenv. Note that virtualenv itself is packaged up together in the platter tarball and the system version will not be used.

To install the package you can do something like this:

$ tar -xzf package-VERSION-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd package-VERSION-linux-x86_64
$ ./install.sh /srv/yourpackage/versions/VERSION
$ ln -sf VERSION /srv/yourpackage/versions/current

Note that platter tarballs have a lot of support for automatic deployments. For more information see Automation with Platter.