Installation of PyICU on Heroku

Question

Anyone know how to install PyICU on Heroku?

Here is what I tried so far:

1. Created a heroku-buildpack-multi application.

In .buildpacks

https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-apt
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python.git

In Aptfile

libicu52
libicu-dev

Then heroku run bash

CPATH=$CPATH/app/.apt/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu
pip install PyICU

And it installs fine.

I need one way to do that during the application's upload phase (push).

I tried:

pip install --global-option=build_ext --global-option="-I/app/.apt/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu" PyICU

and to create a .pydistutils.cfg file in my home directory as

[build_ext]
include_dirs=/app/.apt/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu

In both cases GCC fails to find the header files, but I can see the

-I/app/.apt/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu

flag on the command line.

Used

`gcc -print-prog-name=cc1plus` -v

to find the differences in search paths before and after CPATH=$CPATH/app/.apt/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu

Before:

#include <...> search starts here:
/app/.apt/usr/include
.
/usr/include/c++/4.8
/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/c++/4.8
/usr/include/c++/4.8/backward
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include
/usr/local/include
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include-fixed
/usr/include
End of search list.

After:

#include <...> search starts here:
/app/.apt/usr/include
/app/.apt/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/include/c++/4.8
/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/c++/4.8
/usr/include/c++/4.8/backward
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include
/usr/local/include
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include-fixed
/usr/include
End of search list.

But I'm not a C++ programmer and cannot find what is wrong. Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is a working workaround until a proper answer to the question.

1. Create the application as shown above (use the heroku-buildpack-apt to install libicu52 and libicu-dev).

2. Upload and enter heroku run bash

   CPATH=$CPATH/app/.apt/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu

   pip install wheel

   pip wheel PyICU

This will create a wheel (.whl file) in /app/wheelhouse.

Download the file, save it somewhere in your project and install it by putting its name in your requirements.txt