Installing python modules in production meteor app hosted with galaxy

Question

I have a meteor project that includes python scripts in our private folder of our project. We can easily run them from meteor using exec, we just don't know how to install python modules on our galaxy server that is hosting our app. It works fine running the scripts on our localhost since the modules are installed on our computers, but it appears galaxy doesn't offer a command line or anything to install these modules. We tried creating our own command line by calling exec commands on the meteor server, but it was unable to find any modules. For example when we tried to install pip, the server logged "Unable to find pip".

Basically we can run the python scripts, but since they rely on modules, galaxy throws errors and we aren't sure how to install those modules. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It really depends on how horrible you want to be :)

No matter what, you'll need a well-specified requirements.txt or setup.py. Once you can confirm your scripts can run on something other than a development machine, perhaps by using a virtualenv, you have a few options:

1. I would recommend hosting your Python scripts as their own independent app. This sounds horrible, but in reality, with Flask, you can basically make them executable over the Internet with very, very little IT. Indeed, Flask is supported as a first-class citizen in Google App Engine.
2. Alternatively, you can poke at what version of Linux the Meteor containers are running and ship a binary built with PyInstaller in your private directory.