[Distutils] Distribution latest version permalink?

[Ben Finney]

Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> writes:

> Knowing a distribution name, I'd like to download its latest release
> file - as a single step, for easy shell scripting. Is that possible?

There's not really such a thing as “the latest release file”. Each
distribution can comprise many files; various wheels, eggs, the source
in various formats, etc. Which files are available is different between
distributions.

So a program can't know, just based on a distribution's name, which
files will be available for download. You need to query PyPI and then
choose a URL from what's available.


There is a page for each distribution with links to each file for
download. (This is known as the “simple” PyPI API.)

For example, given the distribution name “pip”, you can get the page
<URL:https://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/> and parse that for links.

You'll need to decide what the “latest” is according to the same rules
as PyPI itself uses. Python's Setuptools library has functions to
compare version strings to determine which is later.


Alternatively, you can parse the user-facing page at
<URL:https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip/> which shows the latest version
of the “pip” distribution. The table listing the files for download
doesn't have semantic markup, and I'm fairly sure no promises are made
to support web scraping. But it's feasible without much effort.

I would recommend using one of the PyPI API pages (the “simple” API is
what I described, I don't know how to use any of the others) since at
least some guarantee is made of their stability.

-- 
 \       “I have a map of the United States; it's actual size. It says |
  `\        ‘1 mile equals 1 mile’. Last summer, I folded it.” —Steven |
_o__)                                                           Wright |
Ben Finney