che[ck-e]xtra 🔎

When you're writing a python library, being able to define extras is sweet. People who are either new to programming in general or python's dynamic nature specifically might be caught off-guard by this feature though, so it might be nice to give them a little help when they run into

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/me/code.py", line 1, in <module>
    import foo
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'foo'

instead of letting them assume that you shipped them a broken distribution.

Usage

This package can be pip-installed

pip install chextra

If you decide that this is a feature that you want in your library, you have to declare chextra as a project dependency as well.

Expected Project Layout

Code that relies on extras being installed will usually sit in a sub-package as a kind of barrier between it and the rest of the code.

It makes sense for the sub-package to have the same name as the extra, since extras are supposed to denote a functionality, which coincides with package naming conventions.

Given a distribution foo with an extra bar, this would be the expected structure:

foo
├── __init__.py
└── bar
    ├── __init__.py
    └── code.py 

Triggering a Warning

You only need add the following code to the __init__.py of the sub-package:

import chextra

chextra.warn(pkg="foo", extras="bar")

And you're done. If someone tries to run import foo.bar or from foo.bar import code, they'll get the following message:

/home/me/my_project.py:3: UserWarning: 
    The feature you're trying to use requires the extra 'bar', 
    install it by running `pip install foo[bar]`.
  chextra.warn(pkg="foo", extras="bar")

If the code is only executed within an attempted import and your extra has the same normalized name as the sub-package, you can also omit the arguments, since their values can be guessed from context.

import chextra

chextra.warn()

Focus

This package tries to be light-weight and not any fancier than it needs to. Installing dependencies automatically when they were found to be missing might sound great, but has been proven to be a bad idea.