Pydicer packaging using Poetry

[dalmouiee]

Hi everyone, we got pydicer packaged and a test version is up on test PyPi (not the official PyPi platform)

I'll just put here some documentation regarding the setup of the tool we'll use to package Pydicer (called Poetry), and how to use it relevant to this project.

Initial Setup using Poetry:

1. Download Poetry relevant to your OS from here
2. Since Pydicer already exists as a project, we used the poetry init command to initiate the relevant file needed to package pydicer up. A new file is produced by the name "pyproject.toml".
3. We run the poetry add command to add the necessary dependencies needed for pydicer. These can be found in the "requirements.txt" and "requirements-dev.txt" (for development if needed). With Poetry, you'll need to pass these in one by one through the command line, (eg. poetry add pydicom>=2.1.2 platipy>=0.1.3 ...). Note: this is done once, when we need to update the dependencies, we use the poetry update DEPENDENCY_NAME after the build command is ran and we'll have the ".lock", more about the lock file in step 4.
4. You can now install the dependencies with poetry using the poetry install command, rather than pip install -r .... If you haven't run install before, then a "poetry.lock" file will be created which will hold the dependencies/their versionings that will be essentially locked to this project. If you have ".lock" file already (which will probably be the case), then the installation will be done by reading it.
5. Now, we build the packaged version of pydicer using the poetry build command. 2 files will be generated under the "dist" folder; "pydicer-PIN-py3-none-any.whl". and "pydicer-PIN-.tar.gz". Essentially, we can use one of these 2 files (preferably ".whl") to install pydicer as a package using pip install ONE_OF_THOSE_FILES and can be distributed with other users to install locally.
6. While the 2 files generated from the poetry build command can be used and distributed for pydicer installation, it's much tider and better practice that we publish these builds on a public forum like PyPi. To do this, we just need to config some options for publishing onto a platform like PyPi, poetry publish --build --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD, where USERNAME or PASSWORD are your PyPi credentials.
7. Once the tool is on PyPi, we can install it with pip install pydicer